From Hyde Park to Jurassic
Park
The
recent excavation of a well-preserved mastodon skeleton at Hyde Park,
New York, by Cornell paleontologists suddenly made this Ice Age creature
headline news. Warren Allmon, Director of the Paleontological Research
Institute (PRI) at Cornell led a team of professional bone hunters in
a well-publicized dig in the backyard of Larry and Laura Lozier's suburban
Hyde Park home, where workmen digging a pond had turned up the aimal's
giant thighbone.
The
Hyde Park story created quite a media splash. CNN filmed the dig, the
Discovery Channel prepared a documentary, Tom Brokaw mentioned the discovery
on the NBC Nightly News, and People magazine devoted a full
page to the event, featuring a photo of the mud-splattered Lozier family
digging for bones in their backyard pit.
At
PRI's website, Cornell geologist John Chiment called the extensive media
coverage a "Mastodon renaissance" comparable to the recent
rebirth of interest in dinosaurs. "I see an exact parallel with
what happened with dinosaurs 30 years ago," he told the Ithaca
Times.
Unfortunately,
few people today are aware that George Washington visited a similar
Hudson River site during the American Revolution to examine bones like
those of the Hyde Park mastodon. In the winter of 1780, when the Continental
Army was camped near West Point, General Washington journeyed across
the snow-cover countryside in a horse-drawn sleigh to view the enormous
teeth of a mysterious animal dug up on a nearby farm.
Two
decades later, in 1801, Charles Willson Peale, the Philadelphia painter
and museum proprietor, dug up the first complete skeleton of the American
monster on a farm in the Hudson River valley near Newbugh. Moreover,
the climax to the mastodon's story came nearly a century after the discovery
of a giant tooth on the banks of the Hudson river north of the present
day town of Hudson.
There
are few historical markers in the Hudson River valley to commemorate
these events and the American monster has disappeared from the region's
folklore, not to mention the nation's history books.
In the current age of Jurassic Park dinosaurs, the jaws of
Tyrannosaurus rex have replaced the mastodon's grinders as
symbols of dominance. When paleontologists dream of cloning the Siberian
mammoth with DNA extracted from its frozen carcass, Paul Semonin's American
Monster sheds new light on the fantasies of absolute power
associated with the resurrection of prehistoric monsters.
©
2003 Paul Semonin