Word: mastodon
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Head of the biology section is Oscar Kirchoff, whose father was brought by Founder Ward from Alsace, and who will mount any skeleton from a humming bird to a mastodon. Humming bird skeletons once cost $25, but Preparator Kirchoff now turns them out with such dispatch that the price has dropped to $10. John Santens, 60, Ward's sole surviving taxidermist, is officially retired but keeps on working. So many schools and museums now teach taxidermy that Ward's demand for stuffed animals has fallen almost to zero, and the antlers of moose, deer and caribou cluttering...
...Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, also a paleontologist, was to talk next for 15 minutes on his hypothesis that the organs of an animal have their own struggle for existence. That is why animals of the same general family have different characteristics. Example: the shovel tusked mastodon developed its lower jaw to scoop food from swamps. The African elephant developed its upper tusks to uproot trees for their tender top leaves. This Osborn theory opposes the Darwinian theory that new types develop from accidental variations of which only those survive which are best adapted to their environment...
...William Berryman Scott, patriarchal Princeton paleontologist, described a dinner party held in Ecuador some 1,600 years ago. A group of Indians sat watery-mouthed while mastodon steaks were sizzling over their fire. Beside the fire were laid their fine Mayan dishes. As the banquet was about to start, woe, in the form of a clay bank, descended upon the party, preserved the bones and pottery for posterity. Uncovered in 1927 by German archeologists, the find redated the reign of the mastodon. Until lately the mastodon was generally thought to have died about 20,000 years...