John J. McKay (Author)
The fascinating saga of solving the mystery of this ancient animal who once roamed the north country—and has captivated our collective imagination ever since.Today, we know that a mammoth is an extinct type of elephant that was covered with long fur and lived in the north country during the ice ages. But how do you figure out what a mammoth is if you have no concept of extinction, ice ages, or fossils? Long after the last mammoth died and was no longer part of the human diet, it still played a role in human life. Cultures around the world interpreted the remains of mammoths through the lens of their own worldview and mythology.When the ancient Greeks saw deposits of giant fossils, they knew they had discovered the battle fields where the gods had vanquished the Titans. When the Chinese discovered buried ivory, they knew they had found dragons’ teeth. But as the Age of Reason dawned, monsters and giants gave way to the scientific method. Yet the mystery of these mighty bones remained. How did Enlightenment thinkers overcome centuries of myth and misunderstanding to reconstruct an unknown animal?The journey to unravel that puzzle begins in the 1690s with the arrival of new type of ivory on the European market bearing the exotic name "mammoth." It ends during the Napoleonic Wars with the first recovery of a frozen mammoth. The path to figuring out the mammoth was traveled by merchants, diplomats, missionaries, cranky doctors, collectors of natural wonders, Swedish POWs, Peter the Great, Ben Franklin, the inventor of hot chocolate, and even one pirate.McKay brings together dozens of original documents and illustrations, some ignored for centuries, to show how this odd assortment of characters solved the mystery of the mammoth and, in doing so, created the science of paleontology.
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Book
Mayor, Adrienne;
(2011)
The First Fossil Hunters: Dinosaurs, Mammoths, and Myth in Greek and Roman Times
(/isis/citation/CBB001550088/)
Book
Hedeen, Stanley;
(2008)
Big Bone Lick: The Cradle of American Paleontology
(/isis/citation/CBB000831278/)
Book
Sepkoski, David;
(2012)
Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology as an Evolutionary Discipline
(/isis/citation/CBB001210043/)
Book
Rudwick, Martin J. S.;
(2014)
Earth's Deep History: How It Was Discovered and Why It Matters
(/isis/citation/CBB001422030/)
Article
Daszkiewicz, P.;
(2005)
Memorandum (1911) about a Well Preserved Mammoth from the Russian Arctic Donated by Aleksander Stenbok-Fermor to Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Paris
(/isis/citation/CBB000530253/)
Book
Cohen, Claudine;
(2002)
The Fate of the Mammoth: Fossils, Myth, and History
(/isis/citation/CBB000201330/)
Article
Laura Valls Plana;
(2016)
A Mammoth in the Park: Palaeontology, Press and Popular Culture in Barcelona (1870–1910)
(/isis/citation/CBB628845058/)
Article
Paige Madison;
(2019)
All Things Bleak and Bare Beneath a Brazen Sky: Practice and Place in the Analysis of Australopithecus
(/isis/citation/CBB654252561/)
Article
Thomas Sharpe;
(2022)
Henri De la Beche's 1829-1830 litograph, duria antiquior
(/isis/citation/CBB971607561/)
Thesis
Marlena Briane Cameron;
(2017)
Fossil Excavation, Museums, and Wyoming: American Paleontology, 1870-1915
(/isis/citation/CBB144188127/)
Article
Paige Madison;
(2016)
The Forgotten Fossil: The Wild Homo Calpicus of Gibraltar
(/isis/citation/CBB054957149/)
Book
Donald R. Prothero;
(2018)
The Story of Life in 25 Fossils: Tales of Intrepid Fossil Hunters and the Wonders of Evolution
(/isis/citation/CBB293277728/)
Chapter
Gwen S. Antell;
(2018)
Digitization reveals and remediates challenges to research on dispersed museum collections from Florissant fossil beds, Colorado
(/isis/citation/CBB854174352/)
Book
Cohen, Claudine;
(2011)
La méthode de Zadig: La trace, le fossile, la preuve
(/isis/citation/CBB001221122/)
Article
Chris Manias;
(2017)
Progress in life's history: Linking Darwinism and palaeontology in Britain, 1860–1914
(/isis/citation/CBB426710736/)
Chapter
Bruce S. Lieberman;
Julien Kimmig;
(2018)
Museums, paleontology, and a biodiversity science–based approach
(/isis/citation/CBB045609940/)
Chapter
Pina Totaro;
(2022)
Le acque e la storia. Fossili e diluvio in Buffon
(/isis/citation/CBB384175206/)
Article
Glendening, John;
(2009)
“The World-Renowned Ichthyosaurus”: A Nineteenth-Century Problematic and Its Representations
(/isis/citation/CBB001213333/)
Book
Tom Sharpe;
(2021)
The Fossil Woman: A Life of Mary Anning
(/isis/citation/CBB900889395/)
Article
Sepkoski, David;
(2014)
Paleontology at the “High Table”? Popularization and Disciplinary Status in Recent Paleontology
(/isis/citation/CBB001420096/)
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