Jefferson’s Fossils

Thomas Jefferson was many things: a revolutionary, an enslaver, a horticulturist, and—by some accounts—the “father of American vertebrate paleontology.” Science historian Keith Thomson looks at Jefferson’s study of fossils—which he suggested were not fossils at all—in an effort to win respect for the natural life of North America.

Thomson writes that, in 1785, Jefferson published Notes on the State of Virginia, a rejoinder to French natural philosopher Count Buffon, who argued that the animals (and people) of the Americas were inferior to those of the Old World. In part, this had to do with the physical size and ferocity of native creatures. Key to Jefferson’s argument was a discussion of fossilized tusks and other remains from an American mastodon that had recently been discovered near the Ohio River.

Jefferson examined several possible explanations for these clearly elephant-like bones showing up in a place far colder than India or Africa. He examined possible solutions proposed by others, including that “an internal fire may once have warmed those regions.” Ultimately, though, he reached a solution reasonably close to a modern scientific explanation: There are different kinds of elephants suited to different climates.

Thomson writes that, for nearly a decade after publishing Notes, Jefferson abandoned scientific work for politics. But in 1796, after he had temporarily retired from government employment, he received a letter from a friend regarding the discovery, in what’s now West Virginia, of “the Bones of a Tremendous animal.” The letter also suggested that the creature “probably was of the Lion kind.”

The fossilized bones of the “great-claw,” shipped to Jefferson’s residence, were parts of a giant, clawed limb. Following his friend’s lead, Jefferson worked on the assumption that this had been some sort of lion—but one with claws at least three times the length of an African lion’s.

However, after seeing a drawing of a South American giant sloth fossil—a genus known as Megatherium—he reluctantly acknowledged that this was a better fit. In the paper he published on the fossil, Thomson writes, “Jefferson still seemed to cling to the idea that things would turn around and it would be revealed as a giant lion after all.”

Importantly, Jefferson’s championing of American megafauna was based on the idea that the fossils were not just the remains of ancient species but the bones of creatures that probably still existed somewhere on the continent. (Fellow scientists of his time used the word “fossil” in its modern sense, but Jefferson consistently referred to the discoveries he studied as “bones.”) He based this partly in religious conviction that God was unlikely to annihilate a type of animal and partly in secondhand stories of enormous creatures from the Indigenous nations of the American West.

While later history proved many of Jefferson’s suppositions incorrect, Thomson suggests he would have been thrilled by the discovery of dinosaur fossils in the American West, even if the creatures they came from were demonstrably extinct.

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