The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium by Juan Pimentel

Author:Juan Pimentel [Pimentel, Juan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2017-01-08T16:00:00+00:00

Figure 27. Juan Bautista Bru and Manuel Navarro, plate number 2, published in José Garriga, Descripción del esqueleto de un cuadrúpedo … (1796).

Figure 28. Georges Cuvier, Megatherium americanum, plate published in “Notice sur le squelette … ,” Magasin Encyclopédique, 2e année, 1, 1796.

But how was one to imagine a sloth more than four meters long and two meters high? In Cuvier’s opinion, the skeleton was that of an extinct animal completely different from any that “we can see today on the earth.” It belonged to an old world (ancien monde). But how old was that world, and how did it differ from the present one?

For the time being, Cuvier stuck to the evidence and to the questions immediately confronting him. He classified the specimen between the sloth (from the shape of its skull) and the armadillo (from its teeth) (Figure 29), and he ventured to call it Megatherium Americanum, “the great American beast.” Soon afterwards he changed the name to Megatherium fossile. The case was closed. By applying the binomial nomenclature to a fossil, Cuvier was pointing to the existence of a remote past and a fauna that had disappeared from the face of the earth. Linnaeus, the modern Adam who had given new names to the living world when he formulated his binary nomenclature—a method devised practically as a mnemonic formula, a game to aid the memory—had said that he felt as though he was attaching the clapper to a bell. That is what happens when the right word is found to designate or name an object or a thing. Something resonates inside it. Cuvier must have had the same sensation. He had given a name to the strange cadaver and assigned it a niche in the animal kingdom, the first step toward recovering its skin: taxonomy, taxidermy. Thanks, first, to the image and then to the word, those bones were beginning to come to life and to recover their place and appearance. The giant sloth was rising energetically from its long, long winter sleep.

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