IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jersey—exactly who now seems to be fotten—found anenormous thighboig out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. Thebone clearly didn』t belong to any species of creature still alive, certainly not in New Jersey.
From what little is known now, it is thought to have beloo a hadrosaur, a large duck-billed dinosaur. At the time, dinosaurs were unknown.
The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation』s leading anatomist, who described it ata meeting of the Ameri Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn. Unfortunately,Wistar failed pletely the bone』s signifid merely made a few cautiousand uninspired remarks to the effect that it was indeed a whopper. He thus missed the ce,half a tury ahead of anyone else, to be the discoverer of dinosaurs. Ihe boed so little ihat it ut in a storeroom aually disappeared altogether.
So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.
That the bone didn』t attract greater i is more than a little puzzling, for its appearancecame at a time when America was in a froth of excitement about the remains of large, aanimals. The cause of this froth was a strange assertion by the great Frenaturalist thete de Buffon—he of the heated spheres from the previous chapter—that living things inthe New World were inferior in nearly every way to those of the Old World. America, Buffonwrote in his vast and much-esteemed Histoire Naturelle , was a land where the water wasstagnant, the soil unproductive, and the animals without size or, their stitutionsweakened by the 「noxious vapors」 that rose from its rotting ss and sunless forests. Insu enviro eveive Indians lacked virility. 「They have no beard or bodyhair,」 Buffon sagely fided, 「and no ardor for the female.」 Their reproductive ans were「small and feeble.」
Buffon』s observations found surprisingly eager support among other writers, especiallythose whose clusions were not plicated by actual familiarity with the try. ADut named eille de Pauw announced in a popular work called RecherchesPhilosophiques sur les Améris that native Ameri males were not only reproductivelyunimposing, but 「so lag in virility that they had milk in their breasts.」 Such viewsenjoyed an improbable durability and could be foued or echoed in Europeas tillhe end of the eenth tury.
Not surprisingly, such aspersions were indignantly met in America. Thomas Jeffersonincorporated a furious (and, uhe text is uood, quite bewildering) rebuttal in hisNotes oate of Virginia , and induced his Neshire friend General John Sullivanto send twenty soldiers into the northern woods to find a bull moose to present to Buffon asproof of the stature and majesty of Ameri quadrupeds. It took the men two weeks to trackdown a suitable subject. The moose, when shot, unfortunately lacked the imposing horns thatJefferson had specified, but Sullivan thoughtfully included a rack of antlers from an elk with the suggestion that these be attached instead. Who in France, after all, would know?
Meanwhile in Philadelphia—Wistar』s city—naturalists had begun to assemble the bones ofa giant elephant-like creature known at first as 「the great Ameri initum」 but lateridentified, not quite correctly, as a mammoth. The first of these bones had been discovered ata place called Big Bone Li Kentucky, but soon others were turning up all over. America,it appeared, had once been the home of a truly substantial creature—ohat would surelydisprove Buffon』s fool