Why were the Founding Fathers so into mastodons?

James Madison, architect of the U.S. government, once measured a weasel to prove a Frenchman wrong. 

“There was an intellectual who wrote a natural history of the world, and in one of those volumes he came up with what was called the theory of American degeneracy,” says Bernard Means, Ph.D., an archaeologist and the director of VCU’s Virtual Curation Lab, where he 3D-prints lots of wild stuff, notably fossils of extinct animals, for exhibits and hands-on educating. “The theory of American degeneracy says that anything in the Americas — he meant, North, Central and South America — was going to be smaller and weaker and basically more effeminate than anything in Europe and Africa,” Means says.

The intellectual was Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a French naturalist and pooh-pooher of all things American. At Thomas Jefferson’s request, Madison measured an American weasel to show Buffon that they were just as big as Old World weasels.

“[Buffon] said people were smaller,” Means says, “that American Indian men couldn’t grow beards, they lactated, things like that — and that not only were things smaller and weaker, but if you went to the Americas, you would eventually become smaller and weaker
as well.

“The Founding Fathers were really concerned about this because, one, they didn’t like being called small, weak and effeminate. Two, they wanted to build a new nation, and how are you going to get people to come to their new country if it’s going to transform them? How are they going to get people to buy their goods if they might be tainted? So they started looking for big things.”

Madison was a naturalist, like many of the Founding Fathers. When they went to defend their new country’s manliness, they weaponized paleontology against Buffon’s book, “Histoire naturelle,” and all its fetching illustrations, offering to the heckling French the skeleton of a mysterious — and, most importantly, large — prehistoric elephant-like animal. They called it the “American incognitum.” We know it as the American mastodon.

More petite than a mammoth and about the size of an African elephant, the American mastodon ranged from Alaska to Mexico and died out 13,000 years ago. Jefferson wrote about it and other large, extinct animals in 1787’s “Notes on the State of Virginia,” the prolific writer’s only book. It’s a compendium of Virginia facts and a Buffon retort. Jefferson also shipped a stuffed moose to France.

During the Revolutionary War, George Washington once stopped at a farm between battles to ogle recently unearthed mastodon bones, and Jefferson asked Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to document the flora and fauna on their 1804 expedition to the west. Benjamin Franklin kept a mastodon tooth, among other fossils, at his Philadelphia home. The tooth, which is about the size of a softball, is on display at Franklin Court in Philadelphia. Means 3D-printed a replica in 2016.

“They all owned fossils,” Means says of the Founding Fathers. “They wrote to each other about it. … In fact, if you go to Monticello today, there are fossils on exhibit that Jefferson exhibited when he lived there.”