How Dinosaurs Changed American Identity

The Trump campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” seems to promise a return to an imagined past, when the nation was better and more authentically “American.” Even if the vision espoused by some MAGA followers never represented the reality of the past, the idea speaks to fears of the changes that have been brought about by a half a century of immigration and civil rights legislation, which have made the nation more diverse and inclusive. And it’s not the first time Americans have used arguments about the past to define national identity.

In fact, traces of past debates about American identity can be found in surprising places: dinosaur museums. Dinosaurs weren’t debating their identity, of course. But the 19th century Americans who built the first dinosaur museums certainly were. Discovering those fossils transformed how Americans saw themselves—and shaped the long debate about who gets to call themselves American.

The 19th century discovery of fossils suggested that the land that became the United States was much older than previously thought. A new consciousness of “deep time” helped Americans of the New World define themselves in opposition to the Old World of Europe. At the same time, Americans of European descent used the discovery of “deep time” to exclude Indigenous people and African Americans from the American story, and to put white, European-descended Americans at its forefront.

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Deep time is a term for the enormous scale of time for planetary and cosmic forces to unfold. Think 14.5 billion years for the universe, 4.5 billion for our planet’s origin, and nearly that for North America’s oldest surface rocks.

The idea of deep time emerged in the United States between the American Revolution and the invention of the automobile. It replaced the older idea that the Earth was only about 6,000 years old and that America was a new nation on a very young continent in the very New World. Many people at the time of the Revolution thought that the New World had risen last from the receding waters of the Flood that had ferried Noah’s Ark to safety. The Old World of Europe had risen earlier, allowing its climate to warm up nicely.

To Europeans, the newness of the New World explained why everything in America was worse than it was in Europe. America’s clammier climate made every living thing shrink and weaken, from plants to animals to people. Elephants, for instance, became tapirs, with stubby trunks and legs. Indigenous people? The theory was that Indigenous men had less facial hair than European men, proof that they were not sufficiently masculine to sprout beards.

In 1776, Americans declared independence from Britain—and from European ideas about American inferiority.

Over the next century, Americans forged a new national identity based on time. Unlike the ancient, crumbling monarchies of Europe, the United States was a young nation, fresh and vigorous.

But Americans soon also claimed a new idea—that their country was actually old and deeply rooted. While their republic was new, the land on which it stood was not only older than Europe, it was the oldest in the world: God’s first creation, a natural Eden created as the setting for a glorious national future.

Evidence for the antiquity of the country came in the early 1820s, when America’s first professional geologists found trilobites spilling out of the banks of the new Erie Canal. What were these strange fossils that looked like horseshoe crabs and were so deeply embedded in the rocks? Even though exact ages for fossils and rocks would not be determined until the invention of radiometric dating in the early 1900s, the relative depth of the trilobites suggested that they must be the remnants of the first life on Earth.

The geologists realized that this was not the familiar garden of Genesis but a watery Eden—and perhaps God’s first ocean, where he’d placed his first creatures, the lowly trilobites.

Americans shipped the trilobites to European scientists who’d also found similar fossils. The industrial revolution had sent both Americans and Europeans digging deep into the Earth to find the ores and minerals that powered modern industries like coal mining. But along the way, all this digging sparked a revolution in thinking about the age of the planet. With scientists on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean finding trilobites in the same rock layers, no one could claim to be older or newer anymore. American scientists crowed with glee over evidence that America was as old as Europe. Maybe even older.

Time deepened as Americans pushed westward in the 19th century. White planters moving into Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana—the “Cotton Kingdom”—were searching for fertile soils. They hired geologists, who scoured the rivers and plantations for the richest ground. Along the way they found fossils of sea monsters like Mosasaurus, the knife-toothed menace of the primal seas. The geologists declared that the South’s bountiful fertility lay in its black, Cretaceous (literally “chalky”) soils.

In the decades before the Civil War, white Americans created a pernicious “science” based on the black-belt soil of the Cotton Kingdom. Long ago, they said, God had created a sparkling ocean, teeming with creatures like the Mosasaurus. As that ocean vanished, its creatures perished, their fossil bones forming the fertile, chalky soils of the South.

Some white Americans also connected the alleged inferiority of Black people to the black-belt soils. They said God had done more than just prepare the American South for slavery by giving it fertile soil. He had also created people with black skin who were the only ones suited to working that soil. “The fertile lowlands of that territory can only be worked by blacks,” one geologist wrote in 1844 as he toured the South. The discovery of these layers of deep time reinforced racial hierarchies in the United States.

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As white Americans moved further westward into the Nebraska territory after the Civil War, they kept fashioning a new American identity based on deep time. Digging deep into the ground to anchor the railroad tracks, they found big, scary dinosaur bones, giving them names like Brontosaurus (thunder lizard) and Tyrannosaurus Rex (tyrant lizard king).

The Western geologists noticed that as those dinosaurs disappeared from the fossil strata, a new cast of fossils appeared above them: mammals. This mammal moment got a name that spelled out its newness: the Eocene, or dawn of the modern era. It spawned, among other creatures, Eohippus, the tiny “dawn horse” that had scampered around America’s first open grasslands.

The story white scientists crafted about these first mammals showed how deep time could operate to exclude. The first Americans (said the scientists) were not the Sioux and other American Indians.

Millions of years ago, the fertile American land itself had given rise to amazing creatures like Eohippus. Eventually, the little horses had migrated to Asia, where they’d grown much bigger, giving the gift of vigorous American life to the whole world. On the backs of horses, human civilization had grown, from the steppes of Asia to Greece, Rome, and Europe. The Spanish Conquistadors after 1492 had brought the horse back to its land of origin: America.

In this story, no human, whether Sioux or Spaniard, was the first American. The first Americans were the mammals of the Eocene. And before them were the first reptiles, the dinosaurs. And before them were the first creatures, the trilobites.

The upshot of the story was that Indians had no more claims to being truly American than white Americans did. At least, this was what some of the first dinosaur hunters in the West said. The long chronological scope of deep time wrote the trilobites, dinosaurs, and first mammals into the story of the United States. Against that enormous and dramatic chronological backdrop, the American Indians shriveled in significance. They were no longer the first Americans.

Next time you gawk at the giant fossils in a dinosaur museum, remember that you’re also looking at a window onto U.S. history and the long debate about who is really American.

Caroline Winterer is William Robertson Coe Professor of American History at Stanford University. Her most recent book is How the New World Became Old: The Deep Time Revolution in America.

Made by History takes readers beyond the headlines with articles written and edited by professional historians. Learn more about Made by History at TIME here. Opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of TIME editors.