Word: megalonyx
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...philosophy, science and mathematics that during his term as John Adams' Vice President, he was also chosen to head the American Philosophical Society. It was to this group that Jefferson, a self-trained paleontologist, presented one of his prize possessions: the fossilized bones of a prehistoric creature he called Megalonyx. Jefferson thought it was a huge, lion-like carnivore, but it turned out to be, alas, a giant ground sloth...
...Field Museum, where he is Assistant Curator of Paleontology, Patterson pieced the fragments together. Last week he announced that he had one of the finest fossil ground sloths discovered in the U. S. since 1796. In that year the huge, extinct beast was first studied and named Megalonyx by a great U. S. paleontologist, Thomas Jefferson...
This was not completely silly. Megalonyx jeffersoni is so recent that its bones sometimes bear wisps of hair. Paleontologist Patterson thinks that cave men helped to exterminate the creatures though "an embrace from a sloth would have made a bear's hug look like child's play." In expecting to bag a Megalonyx, Jefferson was not "wrong by more than a few thousand years." As bone-diggers measure time, this was only day before yesterday...
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