To commemorate the start of another school year, the New York State Museum posted a series of photos on social media from field trips to the original museum, now occupied by the New York State Education Department.
That building, completed in 1912 and distinguished by a colonnade of pillars facing the capitol building, is the place where many of us first saw the State Museum’s zoological collection, which famously included fossils, skeletons and life-sized reconstructions of extinct ice age mammals.
“Extinction,” writes science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, “may be the first scientific idea that children grapple with,” which is perhaps why those displays made such a lasting impression upon me. To be honest, though, I don’t know what excited me more as a fourth or fifth grader – the displays of extinct creatures, the dioramas of Native American life, the meteorites, or simply the thrill of a field trip to an unfamiliar place, especially on a bright spring day.
Be that as it may, as the museum’s comments on the photos remind us, “From the ‘Great State Map’ to the Cohoes Mastodon, there was never a shortage of incredible things for students to see, experience, and learn about while visiting!”
‘Indian Kettles’ and Old Bones
An 1898 issue of Scientific American, which I purchased for its article about those “curious creations of nature,” the “Indian Kettles” of Lake George (actually potholes carved by stones swirling in eddies of water during the last glacial retreat).
It also contains a detailed drawing of the articulated skeleton of the Cohoes Mastodon, which was owned by the State Museum and, when we traveled to Albany, was on display in its Hall of Vertebrate Paleontology.
For us, it was the main attraction. Discovered in 1866 near the confluence of the Mohawk and Hudson Rivers, this mastodon happens to have been found in an “kettle,” similar to those on Lake George. The kettle “appeared as a bog, covered with floating moss,” the author of the article wrote.
He continued, “Excavating disclosed the remains of a mastodon fifty feet below the surface. Evidently in prehistoric times the huge beast had fallen into the hole and could not extricate himself, or else his remains had been washed down with the glacier and had lodged there.”
At least since the 18th century, when a fossilized elk (in reality, a giant deer) was discovered in an Irish peat bog, species extinction had been an unsettling mystery for theologians as well as for the scientific community, one that persisted well into the Napoleonic era.
Before Lewis and Clark set out to explore the west in 1805, for instance, they were instructed by Thomas Jefferson to find all and any evidence that would confirm the existence of our own giant, the mastodon, which Jefferson believed to be larger than the elephant, and, in fact, “the largest of all terrestrial beings.”
The Politics of Extinct Behemoths
Until the discovery of the Cohoes Mastodon in 1866, the best known of these behemoths was an individual whose remains were found near Newburgh, NY in 1801. For Jefferson, the remains of the Hudson Valley mastodon were not merely of scientific interest.
As the American minister in France in the 1780s, Jefferson worked assiduously to refute notions that American flora, fauna and even human intelligence and physical fitness degenerated once transplanted to North America, that, in fact, every aspect of the New World was smaller, weaker and less impressive than their European counterparts.
Jefferson went so far as to order a stuffed, Vermont moose, whose enormous size would astound the French, or so he hoped, for display in Paris.
As Keith Thomson, the British scholar of natural history, notes in his The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in Americae, Jefferson had an “almost visceral need to describe American creatures in terms of their ferocity and power.”
However, the possible extinction of the mastodon was problematic. If this newly-discovered symbol of American might could go extinct, perhaps, too, could the nation’s experiment in democracy, the “New Order for the Ages.”
According to a 2020-2021 exhibit at the Smithsonian, “Alexander Von Humboldt and the United States,” which examined the Prussian-born naturalist’s profound impact on American arts, sciences, literature and politics, Jefferson and other like-minded Americans soon turned their attention from mastodons, wooly mammoths, giant sloths and saber-toothed tigers to other avatars of American exceptionalism – its wild landscapes, such as the one he himself had discovered on Lake George in 1791.
Extinction of the Mastodon
Twenty-five thousand years ago, Upstate New York was covered in ice. As the ice retreated, plants and animals began to claim the newly exposed land for themselves. Roughly 17,000 years ago, Caribou appeared. That species arrived when its preferred habitat, the tundra, began to emerge. When boreal forests developed, mastodons colonized the region, finally disappearing 12,000 years ago.
By the time Thomas Jefferson died in 1826, species extinction was no longer controversial. Indeed, its existence was indisputable. As Von Humboldt wrote in 1814, “in the new world, as well as the old, generations of species long extinct have preceded those which now people the earth, the waters and the air.”
But while species extinction is no longer controversial, its causes continued to be debated. Some, like Charles Darwin himself, have attributed extinction to the evolutionary process. Others, following the 18th century French philosopher Georges Cuvier, have posited some catastrophic event. Still others have attributed the mass extinctions to a loss of habitat caused by climate change.
Could the loss of habitat have led to the extinction of the Cohoes Mastodon?
Humans’ Role in Species Extinction
The exhibition of the extinct animals that we saw in the old State Museum in the 1960s was created by David Lithgow, the Scots-born artist best known for his painting of John Brown, hanging in the Essex County courthouse.
Over the past several years, the museum’s scientists have subjected the historic specimens to state-of-the art analyses in order to better understand when and why these creatures disappeared from New York.
As the State Museum noted in a press release announcing the publication of the scientists’ work, more than 50 species of large mammals disappeared from North America after the Ice Age. The scientists found that at the time of the mastodon’s extinction, its preferred habitat was still intact; habitat loss alone could not have been the cause of its demise.
At the time of our visit to the museum as school children, no evidence that human beings co-existed with mastodons had been found in New York State. Since then, however, signs of human activity, from animal bones to spear points, have been located near the sites where mastodons were discovered, leading paleontologists to believe that Paleo-Indians hunted and butchered the animal.
Those discoveries would seem to support the conclusions of Feranec and Kozlowski that while humans may not have been the only cause of the extinction of mastodons in New York, in all likelihood, they played a role.
They confirm what Elizabeth Kolbert asserted in The Sixth Extinction, that “a wave of disappearances… coincided with the spread of modern humans, and, increasingly, is understood to have been a result of it.”
Human-induced climate change, she writes, has had a similar effect upon hundreds of species of plants and animals. “Humans are now so rapidly transforming the planet — changing the atmosphere, altering the chemistry of the oceans, reshuffling the biosphere—that many scientists argue that we’ve entered a whole new geological epoch: the Anthropocene,” she writes.
What future generations of visiting school children may learn from the museum’s sloth, mammoth and mastodon is not only that some creatures, perhaps all creatures, will someday disappear from the face of the earth.
They will also learn, perhaps indirectly and perhaps only gradually, that they themselves are responsible for the future of the planet and its inhabitants.
That, I imagine, is a lesson that even the most frugal school district would find worth the price of a field trip.
A version of this essay first appeared in the Lake George Mirror, America’s oldest resort paper, covering Lake George and its surrounding environs. You can subscribe to the Mirror HERE.
Illustrations, from above: Students visit the old New York State Museum in Albany, ca. 1965; Lake George’s “Indian Kettles,” ca. 1925; Hall of Vertebrate Paleontology, Old New York State Museum, ca. 1920; the Cohoes mastodon on display at the old New York State Museum; and a map showing the proportion of extinct large mammal species (more than or equal to 22 lbs) in each country during the last 132,000 years, only counting extinctions earlier than 1,000 years ago.
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