Dinosaurs in the Attic

by Douglas Preston

  A slight, precise man with a neatly trimmed goatee, Chubb was a familiar figure at the Museum during the first half of this century. He was usually fussily dressed in a gold pince-nez, with waistcoat and tie covered by a white lab coat or apron. When he wasn't mounting bones in the Museum, he could usually be found at horse or dog races, not placing bets but taking photographs and chatting with the owners and jockeys.

  Chubb's interest in bones, he reported in an autobiographical article, began as a child, when he found a dead cat under the porch of his Maryland home. He began looking for other dead animals, which he would spread out on the roof of his father's barn to decompose. When this arrangement quickly proved unsatisfactory to his parents, he hid the carcasses in the woods and returned later when they had been picked clean by scavengers and the elements. Since he lived in Maryland horse country, most of his bones came from dead horses.

  Through sheer trial and error he taught himself how to mount skeletons, and this experimentation led him in turn to study the horse's movements, and how its bones articulated with one another. (In his first experiment with bone movement, Chubb reported, he attached a row of horse skulls to the edge of the woodshed roof. When he pulled strings attached to their jawbones, the row of skulls clacked their teeth in a wonderfully macabre fashion.)

  At sixteen, just around the turn of the century, Chubb came to New York City and found work as a machinist. He spent much of his spare time, however, at the Museum. He quickly realized that the vast majority of skeletons in the Museum (and indeed in most museums) were carelessly mounted—often more poorly than his own early efforts. Chubb concluded that these professional osteologists simply hadn't studied how the animals moved—they had merely observed where the bones connected and then stuck them together.

  He found his way into the office of Henry Fairfield Osborn, at that time the curator of the Vertebrate Paleontology Department, and with a few of his samples showed the paleontologist why some of the Museum's mounts were sloppy. Impressed, Osborn bought one of Chubb's mounted cats for forty dollars, and ordered a mounted opossum and a raccoon. In 1901, Osborn decided to hire Chubb full-time to help prepare the Museum's planned Hall of Osteology.

  Naturally, Chubb decided that mounts of the horse would be the best way to teach visitors about animal locomotion; mounts of famous racehorses would be even better. Chubb made the rounds of some of the famous racehorse owners of the time, delicately suggesting that they donate the bodies of their prize horses if they should happen to die. While some owners immediately ejected chubb from their offices for such a morbid suggestion, others liked the idea that their best horses might end up in a museum. Chubb didn't have to wait long; the owner of the famous stallion Sysonby, James R. Keene, wrote to him in 1906 that his champion stallion had unexpectedly died, and shortly thereafter the dead horse arrived at the Museum.

  Chubb wanted to capture Sysonby at the peak of his speed. At that time it had only recently been established (in a famous bet) that for a split second during full gallop, all four of a horse's hooves leave the ground. But before mounting the animal in such a position, Chubb wanted to establish the position of its legs and body during various phases of its stride. Using a borrowed racehorse on the grounds of the Museum, he painted white stripes and spots on the horse's body. While the horse trotted or galloped along, Chubb photographed it from every conceivable angle. One photograph of Chubb shows him dangling about thirty feet directly above a trotting horse, photographing straight down onto its back, which had been strangely painted with dots and lines.

  Chubb spent eleven months mounting Sysonby. Following the usual procedure (described in the previous chapter) he roughed out the carcass and dumped it in one of the maceration vats. During the first few nights, Chubb lived in an adjacent room so that he could tend the small Bunsen burners that kept the water at an even 98 degrees Fahrenheit. In two weeks most of Sysonby could be drained out of the vat, and Chubb put the bones in benzene for another six to eight weeks.

  Chubb assembled the skeleton under a complex scaffold he called his "osteological Christmas tree." He dangled each bone from the scaffolding by a string and made adjustments to its length until it was hanging in its correct position for the mount. A flexible rod, threaded through the spinal cord, anchored the mount, and the other bones were attached, one by one, with slender pins, pipes, and wires. During the months-long process, Chubb adjusted and readjusted each bone numerous times, using his marked photographs as a guide. When he was finally satisfied that everything was correctly in place, the ribs were hung and pinned to thin metal bands along the inside of the ribcage. Every bone of the horse became part of the mount, including several vestigial ribs no larger than a toothpick.

  Innovative mount followed innovative mount as Chubb's career progressed. At last, in 1949, forty years after mounting Sysonby, Chubb began his most challenging—and his last—mount. This time he chose a less glamorous subject: a donkey nibbling at botfly eggs on his left hind leg. The donkey is rwisted in one of the most contorted and asymmetrical positions the animal could assume, making it an extraordinarily difficult mount. As Chubb was making the final minute adjustments to the mount, he collapsed. The most accomplished osteological preparator in the Museum's history died two weeks later, at the age of eighty-five.

  Chubb's horses now trot along a twisting corridor, each one enclosed in its own glass case. Bringing up the rear of this lively procession is the giant skeleton of an elephant, its head nearly bumping the ceiling. This skeleton comes from one of the most famous animals of all time, whose name has become synonymous with immensity—Jumbo.

  The story of Jumbo the elephant, although perhaps somewhat peripheral to that of the Museum, illustrates the fortuitous way in which many odd specimens can end up in its collections.

  JUMBO THE ELEPHANT

  The pillar of a people's hope,

  The center of a world's desire.

  —from a newspaper obituary of Jumbo, the King of Elephants

  A little over a century ago, Jumbo the elephant arrived in New York aboard the ship Assyrian Monarch. The great beast was paraded up Broadway, accompanied by brass bands, dancing girls, wildly cheering crowds, and all the fanfare that P. T. Barnum's formidable publicity machine could unleash. Three years later, Jumbo was dead—struck down by a speeding freight train.

  Barnum scattered Jumbo's remains far and wide. His tusks, badly shattered in the accident, were mostly sliced up for souvenirs, or eaten (more about that later). His heart was reportedly sold to Cornell University for forty dollars. His stuffed skin (mounted by the great Carl Akeley) was given to Tufts University, where it became the school's beloved mascot until it burned in a fire in 1975. And his bones—after a brief tour—were deposited in the American Museum of Natural History. His skeleton was exhibited now and then for seventy years, but as the memory of Jumbo faded from children's minds, it was eventually taken off exhibition permanently in 1977.

  Jumbo's journey from Africa to the mammalogy section of the Museum began in nineteenth-century Abyssinia (now Ethopia), along the banks of the Settite River. It was here in 1861 that a group of Arabs trapped him, possibly for sale to a European zoo. (Another account has him captured on the shores of Lake Chad.) At the time, Jumbo was a calf, standing only forty inches high at the shoulder. The elephant first traveled to the menagerie at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, which later traded him to the Royal Zoological Gardens in London, reportedly for a rhinoceros. At the zoo, Jumbo was a perfectly ordinary elephant until he reached the age of seven, when his keeper began noticing a vast increase in his appetite. His intake of food soon reached a point at which he consumed, on a daily basis, two hundred pounds of hay, two bushels of oats, a barrel of potatoes, several quarts of onions, and ten to fifteen loaves of bread. His keeper, Matthew Scott, allegedly said that for medicinal purposes Jumbo was sometimes allowed two gallons of whiskey. (Scott himself was a teetotaler.) Jumbo's fame grew with his size, and soon he had become the most famous animal in England.<
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  In 1882, Phineas T. Barnum quietly approached the director of the London Zoo and offered him $10,000 for the elephant, a staggering sum for the time. When the deal was legally concluded and "securely buttoned up" in Barnum's vest pocket, news of the sale leaked out. The British public reacted instantaneously and furiously; the sale was denounced across the country. Barnum fanned the fires of controversy by making various provocative statements, which resulted in his public damnation by the Prince of Wales. The publicity was invaluable, and by the time Jumbo arrived in the States he was already a household name. Wherever the Barnum, Bailey & Hutchinson Circus went, Jumbo drew huge crowds. Barnum was to claim that more than one million American children rode on his back.*32

  Jumbo was cut down at the height of his fame. On September 15, 1885, the circus animals were being loaded on a train at the railroad yards of St. Thomas, Ontario. To allow the large animals to cross the tracks and board the train, a section of railside fence had been taken down. Jumbo and a baby elephant named Tom Thumb had just been brought alongside the cars when an express freight train came thundering toward them along the other set of tracks. Scott, the keeper, scrambled out of the way and screamed to Jumbo to run. With his trunk high in the air, the alarmed elephant charged down the track away from the train, but in his panic he ran past the gap in the fence. When Jumbo realized his mistake he wheeled about, galloping back along the tracks toward the opening. The train first struck Tom Thumb and knocked him, hurt but alive, down an embankment. Then it struck Jumbo head-on. The collision killed Jumbo instantly and derailed the train.

  Barnum suddenly had to face the loss of his most profitable attraction. Drawing on his remarkable resources, he immediately began shamelessly concocting stories about Jumbo that would ensure the elephant's (and Barnum's) place on the front pages everywhere. In one account of Jumbo's death, he wrote, "Jumbo sacrificed his life to save that of Tom Thumb, a pigmy elephant. [He] had snatched the little elephant from in front of the thundering train and hurled the little fellow twenty yards to safety." Sure enough, Barnum struck gold again, and the front pages of newspapers all over the world poured out column-inches of heartrending copy that repeated many of Barnum's apocryphal stories.

  Scientifically speaking, Jumbo was an important animal. When he attained .record size, zoologists believed that he represented a new species of elephant, and accordingly, though still alive, he was designated the type specimen for his species. After his death, it was imperative that zoologists be able to dissect the animal and obtain its skeleton for future study.*33

  Jumbo's carcass was therefore immediately removed to Henry Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, for dissection, mounting, and stuffing. A man named Peters performed the "inside work," climbing into the elephant's body cavity and dissecting various organs. One witness described poor Peters as emerging from the mess every few minutes "looking a little white around the gills." (Transportation was slower in those days, and Jumbo had started to decompose.) When Peters sliced open the stomach, out spilled a "hatful" of English pennies, a half-crown, several rivets, a bunch of keys, and a bobby's whistle. The hide weighed 1,538 pounds and the bones 2,400 pounds. Although the entire elephant was never weighed, he was estimated at about six tons.

  Barnum gave Ward strict instructions concerning the stuffing of Jumbo. "By all means," he wrote, "make him show like a mountain." Carl Akeley did a fine job of increasing the animal's height in death by about a foot. He also repaired the shattered skull and mounted the bones.

  Barnum, determined to squeeze every ounce of publicity out of the elephant, planned a gala for the unveiling of the stuffed elephant and its mounted bones. He invited a crowd of reporters and high-society ladies to a fancy hotel. During a series of flowery speeches, Barnum served his guests a gelatia dish made from a pound and a half of Jumbo's finely ground tusks.

  Jumbo's remains traveled with Barnum's circus for several years; he eventually gave the stuffed skin to Tufts, where he was a trustee, and the scientifically important bones to the Museum. When Jumbo was taken off exhibition, his aged and crumbling skeleton was wrapped in a plastic shroud and stored in the bowels of the Museum. Just a few years ago the Mammalogy Department refurbished the skeleton, repaired its mounts, and moved it into the same corridor as the Chubb horses. Now Jumbo brings up the rear of a parade of skeletons along the hall, a silent memorial to one of the most famous animals of all time.

  THE WARREN MASTODON

  Another sort of elephant parade can be seen in the Museum's Hall of Late Mammals. (By "late," the Museum means recently extinct, not deceased.) Four mastodons and mammoths parade single-file down the center of the hall, frozen in taxonomic sequence. The most famous of the quartet is the Warren Mastodon, second in line, named after the scientist who acquired it for his personal collection. One of the most complete mastodons known, it is the remains of a beast that wandered along the shores of the Hudson River perhaps ten or twenty thousand years ago. The hapless animal came to an untimely end in what is now Orange County, New York, by venturing too far into a boggy patch of peat moss.

  The discovery of this venerable skeleton dates from before the Civil War. The summer of 1845 was dry and hot in upstate New York, and a number of shallow ponds and bogs had dried up. The local farmers began digging up some of these bogs, since the peat and marl they contained made excellent fertilizer for their fields. One of these farmers was Nathaniel Brewster of East Coldenham, New York, who hired a gang of workmen to cut the peat out of one bog and spread it on his fields. The men had dug about three feet into the soft peat when one of them struck something hard. Further digging exposed a four-foot-long skull with a pair of gracefully curving, almost flawless ivory tusks.

  Not knowing what to do, Brewster called the local doctor, a man named Prime, who lived in the nearby town of Newburgh. Dr. Prime sped down to the Brewster farm in his carriage to supervise the excavation. As the workmen dug, they gradually brought to light a beautifully preserved skeleton of a mastodon, standing upright just as it had sunk in the mire hundreds of centuries before. The skeleton's position gave an indication of the animal's last terrifying moments as it sank into the bog. Its legs were thrust forward and slightly apart, and its skull was tilted upward as if straining for the last breath of air.

  While most mastodon bones turn black with age, these bones were remarkably well preserved and only lightly stained. One paleontologist described them as "beautiful" and the color of "old human bones." Although the animal's flesh had decayed and vanished, the contents of its stomach remained.

  Dr. Prime later described the discovery of the mastodon's last meal:

  In the midst of the ribs, embedded in the marl and unmixed with shells or carbonate of lime, was a mass of matter, composed principally of the twigs of trees broken into pieces about two inches in length, and varying in size from very small twigs to half an inch in diameter. There was mixed in with these a large quantity of finer vegetable substance, like finely divided leaves; the whole amounting to from four to six bushels. From the appearance of this, and its situation, it was supposed to be the contents of the stomach; and this opinion was confirmed on removing the pelvis, underneath which, in the direction of the last of the intestines, was a train of the same material, about three feet in length [and] four inches in diameter.

  When the beast was finally exhumed, Prime had the bones carried to Brewster's barn. During the weeks that followed, neighbors came to watch the enthusiastic doctor carefully fitting and wiring the bones together in the gloom of the barn. In classic nineteenth-century style the mounted bones went on tour, stopping at various small towns in New England and upstate New York, where it drew crowds of amazed viewers. (Unfortunately, the original tusks had crumbled to pieces upon drying out, and the mastodon had had to be fitted with a pair of fakes.)

  By this time, New York State had already yielded a number of mastodon fossils. As early as 1705, according to an article by Henry Fairfield Osborn, Governor Dudley of New York m
entioned in a letter to Cotton Mather that several mastodon bones and teeth had been found near Albany. In 1782 the first mastodon bones found in Orange County were unearthed on a farm outside Newburgh. (George Washington even made a special trip to see these bones during his sojourn at Newburgh in the winter of 1782-83.) In 1802 a complete mastodon skeleton came to light on John Masten's farm near Newburgh. It was excavated by Charles Willson Peale and his sons, Rembrandt and Titian.*34

  The Warren Mastodon was the fifth complete probiscidian found in Orange County, and the locals were proud of their mastodon heritage. An Outline History of Orange County, by Samuel W. Eager (published the year after the Warren Mastodon was found), contained a section on mastodons. The subject strained the author's somewhat limited literary gifts, but it provides a fascinating pre-Darwinian view of paleontology:

  We cannot, without disrespect to the memory of a lost but giant race, and slighting the widespread reputation of old Orange as the mother of the most perfect and magnificent specimens of terrestrial animals, omit to tell of the mastodon. Contemplating his remains as exhumed from their resting place for unknown ages, we instinctively think of his great and lordly mastery over the beast—of his majestic tread as he strode these valleys and hilltops—of his anger when excited to fury—stamping the earth till trembling beneath his feet-snuffing the wind with disdain, and uttering his wrath in tones of thunder,—and the mind quails beneath the oppressive grandeur of the thought, and we feel as if driven along by the violence of a tornado. When the pressure of contemplation has subsided and we recover from the blast, we move along and ponder on the time when the mastodon lived,—when and how he died, and the nature of the catastrophe that extinguished the race; and the mind again becomes bewildered. Were they pre-Adamites, and did they graze upon the fields of Orange and bask in the sunlight of that early period of the globe?—or were they antediluvian, and carried to a common grave by the deluge of the Scriptures?—or were they postdiluvian only, and till very recent periods wandered over our hills and fed in these valleys.