|Doctor Koch and his “Immense Antediluvian Monsters”
By Douglas E. Jones
Click image for
article is a reprinting of a piece that appeared
in issue 12 (Spring 1989) of Alabama Heritage,
pp. 2-19. Copyright The University of Alabama.
Click images to enlarge ]
was wet and cold in southwest Alabama in the early spring of 1845,
but the man dug away steadily at the large fossil bones exposed in
the gray limy soil. After years of searching for specimens to display
in his museum
in St. Louis, Albert Koch was determined to let nothing delay
his work. A self-taught paleontologist and a commercial exhibitor
of natural curiosities, Koch had invested much of his financial
resources in this long awaited trip with one goal in mind—to
find and excavate one of Alabama’s famous fossil whales.
His recent discovery of whale fossils at several sites in Clarke
and Choctaw counties had led him to believe that this particular
trip might turn out to be the most exciting and profitable of
was a matter of considerable concern to Albert Koch. His museum
drew large crowds only when strange and spectacular creatures
were displayed, keeping the peripatetic Koch busy searching
for new specimens. Noted for its eclectic and curious exhibits,
museum (admission 50 cents) boasted, among other attractions,
striking wax likenesses of President Andrew Jackson and Mexican
General Santa Anna, rare stuffed birds, “cosmoramic views” of
battles and ancient cities, and an exhibition of the infernal
regions. A live grizzly bear and five alligators—one
fifteen feet long—thrilled visitors, especially those
who hoped to see a fight between bear and reptile. One reptile
did manage to fall to his death from a third-floor window one
night, creating panic among the few people afoot at the time.
the mastodon skeleton incorrectly assembled by
Koch with several extra vertebrae and ribs and
a rakish angle to the tusks, was later purchased
by the British Museum and assembled correctly. (From The
Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature,
and Art, edited by Spencer Fullerton Baird,
An advertisement in the St.
Louis Daily Commercial Bulletin, September 3, 1838,
under the intriguing caption “Did You Ever See A
Prock?” invited readers to view a creature never before
displayed in the Old New World—a stuffed mule-like
animal with short, thick legs, bushy tail, and a rhinoceros-like
head, horn, and all. P. T. Barnum had nothing on Albert Koch
when it came to showmanship.
dismiss Albert Koch, however, as simply one of the more ingenious
showmen of his day would be unfair. Koch appears to have
been a keen observer of geologic phenomena and a competent
natural historian, although he was not professionally trained.
Even distinguished paleontologists who described Koch’s
commercial zeal and labeled him a fossil merchant did not
deny that he was a dedicated and persistent man who had succeeded
in bringing to light many specimens of fossil vertebrates
that otherwise might have gone undetected. The practical
side of the matter was simply that Koch depended on the sale
of his highly touted specimens to support the acquisition
of fossil bones and other “petrifications.” The
more spectacular the specimens he found, the more money he
made, and the more time he had for fossil hunting.
How Koch came to his
curious profession remains unclear, as little is known of
his private life. Only through the diary he kept between
1844 and 1846 (published in 1847), and through his obituary
and that of his son do we gain any information about him.
Ernst A. Stadler, who translated Koch’s
diary from the German in 1972, and who uncovered much of
the information known about Koch’s life, tells us that
he was born May 10, 1804, in Roitzsch, a village of 1,300 in
the Prussian Duchy of Saxony. The son of a magistrate and administrator
of the royal domain, Koch apparently learned his appreciation
for natural history from his father, an avid collector of shells
and birds. Given his father’s position in the community,
it is likely that young Koch acquired at least a secondary education.
In 1826 Koch, aged twenty-two, arrived in America, apparently
settling into the German community in St. Louis, Missouri. By
1830 he was in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he married a Miss Reid
of Philadelphia, with whom he subsequently had four children.
The first evidence of Koch’s return to St. Louis is an 1836
newspaper advertisement for his museum in that city. This facility not only housed Koch’s collection of natural curiosities, it doubled as a theatre, featuring plays, ventriloquists, bird imitators, and magicians. The energetic Mr. Koch served as
Income from the museum and theatre financed Koch’s extensive fossil-hunting travels within the region. Despite poor health and limited funds, Koch, according to the St. Louis Daily Evening Gazette, April 30, 1840, was a tireless traveler:
who have ever visited the St. Louis Museum, know that it
is kept by a plain man, without a bit of pretense, affectation,
or quackery in his composition. His ardor as a virtuoso
is equally remarkable as the singleness of his mind and simplicity
of his manners. Let Mr. Koch hear that a strange fossil
has been exhumed within three or four hundred miles of his
residence, and he is sure to be there. No man has been so indefatigable—no
man has expended half as much money, time, and labor
in exploring and bringing to the light of day the remains of
antiquity which have been buried for uncounted centuries
in the bosom of our forests and prairies.
trip throughout the Missouri in 1840, Koch received an exciting
message. A farmer, in the process of building a mill, had uncovered
a number of large fossil bones. Although ill with a fever from “inhaling
unhealthy swamp air,” Koch
caught the next steamboat up the Missouri River and within six
days reached the secluded site. Four months and innumerable hardships
later, he emerged with the skeleton of a spectacular Ice Age elephant
or mastodon, which he named Missourium in honor of its discovery
Missourium was a smash hit at Koch’s St. Louis Museum,
in part perhaps because Koch improved on nature a bit. Whether out
of anatomical ignorance or commercial zeal, he had assembled the
creature’s bones incorrectly, rendering it considerably larger
than it had been in life. Koch’s mastodon, an awesome
thirty-two feet long and fifteen feet high, contained several
extra vertebrae and ribs. Using blocks of wood, Koch had also
expanded unnaturally the spaces between the vertebrae, where
soft tissue had once resided.
that he had a commercial success on his hands, Koch sold his
museum in 1841 and took his prize on the road, touring several
cities in the United States, including New Orleans and Philadelphia,
before heading for London. Although the general public could
not discern Koch’s improvements in Missourium, paleontologists
could, and a lively debate sprang up in the scientific community
on both sides of the Atlantic as to exactly what Mr. Koch did
or did not know about vertebrate anatomy. Apparently unfazed,
Koch placed Missourium on display at the British Museum (Natural
History), and in 1843 he sold the fossil to that institution
for some 1,300 pounds sterling, a very tidy sum in those days.
Reconstructed skeleton of Basilosaurus cetoides (Owen), based
on three specimens from Choctaw County, Alabama. Scale
bar one meter. The presence of a functionless pelvic structure
provides evidence in support of the hypothesis that zeuglodons
had land-dwelling ancestors a hundred million years earlier. (From A
Review of the Archaeoceti by Remington Kellog, Carnegie
Institution of Washington, 1936.)
the proceeds of the Missourium sale at his disposal, Koch returned
to the United States in 1844 and embarked on a two-year odyssey
in search of even more spectacular fossils. His travels took
him up and down the eastern coast from Gay Head on Martha’s
Vineyard to New Orleans, to Clarke County, Alabama. It was in Alabama—considered
by many geologists to be the most fertile site in the world for
hunting fossil whales [see “Fossil Whales in Alabama”]—that
Koch uncovered the greatest find of his career: a gigantic whale
skeleton. Koch called the creature a sea serpent.
of Albert Koch’s Alabama odyssey had been known
to paleontologists since the mid-1830s, when the first bone (a
single vertebra) of this previously unknown species of extinct
whale was found along the Ouachita River in Arkansas. Dr. Richard
Harlan, Philadelphia naturalist, physician, and author of the first
systematic treatise on American mammals, examined the bone and
declared it that of a reptile, which he named Basilosaurus, or “King
of the Lizards.” Subsequently, in Clarke County, Alabama,
paleontologists found a more complete specimen of this fifty-
to seventy-foot creature, which Harlan described for a scientific
publication in 1835.
The huge size of the fossils and their indeterminate
scientific affinity soon evoked a lively transatlantic controversy
over the exact relationship of the animal. Was it a reptile or
a mammal? Did it have characteristics of a dinosaur or a whale?
the next few years, scientists uncovered similar fossils at a number
of localities in the same thin bed of 40,000,000-year-old marine
clay that crops out in a narrow band across southwest Alabama and
contiguous areas in Mississippi. These fossils were shipped to
experts at universities and museums along the Atlantic coast
and abroad for examination. Based on the study of these remains,
particularly the differentiated teeth, the noted anatomist Richard
Owen of London—the
man responsible for coining the word “dinosaur” some
fifteen years earlier—concluded that the animal was a mammal,
not a reptile. Owen named the creature Zeuglodon cetoides,
its species name reflecting its proposed affinity to the modern
whale order Cetacea.
However, the business of assigning scientific names
to creatures includes the principle of priority, that is, the
name first applied to an organism cannot be changed. Therefore,
proper name today is Basilosaurus cetoides (Owen), a designation
employing the names of Harlan’s genus and Owen’s species.
The term “zeuglodon” is still used as the common name
for this diverse group of long skulled, toothed marine mammals
thought to be ancestral to some modern whales. The name, based
on the peculiar serrated cusps of the molars and premolars, means “yoke
tooth” in Greek.
The Alabama zeuglodon, by now a subject of
considerable discussion among scientists, also attracted the
attention of one of Owen’s
British colleagues, the world renowned geologist Sir Charles Lyell.
On his second trip to the United States, in 1846, Lyell himself
traveled to Alabama to see, among other geologic sights, the much
touted outcrop yielding the fossils. The eminent geologist was
impressed. In his journal he commented that in a three-day period
he probably viewed the remains of not less than forty individual
specimens of zeuglodon. In fact, so common were the bones that
in parts of Clarke, Choctaw, and Washington counties they created
a problem for the farmer’s plow. Slaves piled up the bones
around the edges of fields so that crops could be managed more
easily. In some places, local farmers had used vertebrae (ten to
eighteen inches in diameter and of varying lengths) as foundation
posts for houses. (Some zeuglodon vertebrae are still used for
house foundations in south Alabama today—a rare case of
a useful vertebrate fossil.)
The rich fossil outcropping in
Alabama, of course, had not escaped the attention of the intrepid
Albert Koch, who arrived in southwest Alabama in January 1845 and
spent the following three months searching for zeuglodon bones.
On foot and horseback, he traversed the region around Macon, Clarksville,
Coffeeville, St. Stephens, and Old Washington Courthouse. By April
he had discovered a number of promising sites and had begun digging.
Finally, at a site on the Sinatbouge Creek (a tributary of the
Tombigbee River in north Washington County), Koch uncovered the
skeleton of an extinct species of gigantic fossil whale, or zeuglodon.
He recorded the event in his diary:
colossal skeleton lay there connected to the extent that it
formed unmistakably a sort of half-circle….the head
was completely turned around and…the lower jaw bone
was lying approximately 1 foot from it, pressed together
in an angle of 45 degrees. In the upper and lower jaw many
teeth were still preserved….The
front part of the head, consisting of tender bone substance,
had suffered the most, as had the upper teeth parts, but of
the whole so much still existed that the missing parts could
be replaced artificially.
unlike his experience with Missourium, Koch collected
more bones than a single respectable zeuglodon possessed in life.
His “reconstruction” of
the Alabama material resulted in a creature of greatly exaggerated
size—a source of joy for the curious and a bone of contention
(no pun intended) to the paleontological fraternity. What the dedicated
fossil hunter had done was to collect various parts of zeuglodon
anatomy, representing at least six different animals, and assemble
them into a sea monster 114 feet long. Never one to let the lack
of scientific knowledge interfere with a commercial enterprise,
Koch took his new star on the road.
Koch used this etching of the zeuglodon he constructed
on several exhibition pamphlets.
displayed the monster at the Apollo Saloon in New York City in
1845 and “scientifically” described
it in the public program as Hydrargos sillimani. Hydrargos,
the genus name, means “sea
chief.” The species, sillimani, Koch named in honor of the
renowned Benjamin Silliman of Yale, founder of the American
Journal of Science. This genuine but commercial dedication
soon was scotched by Silliman himself who insisted that the species
be named for Harlan, who first described the beast. Always anxious
to accede to the requests of his paleontological betters, “Doctor” Koch,
as he now called himself, revised the program and doubtless congratulated
himself for placing credit where it was due. Meanwhile, the eminent
Professor Silliman rejoiced over divorcing his name from such
chicanery. The learned Dr. Harlan was by then the late Dr. Harlan
and unable to defend himself.
To Koch’s delight, the public reception of Hydrargos was enthusiastic and profitable. Journalists praised the
magnificent beast and waxed eloquent as to its nature and origin.
The New York Evangelist reporter wrote:
Who knows but he had seen the Ark? Who knows
but Noah had seen him from the window? Who knows but
he may have visited Ararat? Who knows how many dead and wicked
giants of old he had swallowed and fed upon? Perhaps, when
we now touch his ribs, we are touching the residium of some
descendants, that perished in the deluge.
reporter speculated that a meal for the creature would consist
of three buffaloes. Koch, who must have enjoyed the publicity
thoroughly, encouraged further public excitement in his published
program, calling the creature “without exception the largest
of all fossil skeletons, found either in the old or new world.” When
alive, he speculated, this “blood thirsty monarch of the
waters” must have measured “over one hundred and forty
for 1845 New York exhibit of Koch’s Alabama “Great
But not everyone
was impressed by Koch’s
fossil. Scientists who examined the exhibit in New York criticized
improbable size and noted that it consisted of parts of more than
one individual. They also concluded that the creature was a mammal—not
a reptile—agreeing with Professor Owen’s earlier
determination. Dissatisfied with this critical scientific evaluation,
Koch decided to transport the fossil to Europe for examination
by celebrated anatomists and naturalists there.
After changing the creature’s
name from Hydrargos, “sea
chief,” to Hydrarchos, “sea ruler,” Koch exhibited
it in Leipzig and later in Berlin, where King Friedrich Wilhelm
IV of Prussia, “the friend of natural scientists,” requested
its display at the Royal Anatomical Museum. Impressed by the exhibit,
the monarch subsequently purchased Hydrarchos from Koch, providing
him a yearly pension for life. When the museum’s experts
examined the specimen, however, they echoed the criticisms of the
American experts. The majority of the creature’s bones were
those of Harlan’s Basilosaurus, the scientists concluded;
the remaining fragments belonged to several new species which
were subsequently described in scientific journals by German
by the dissolution of his zeuglodon and happy with the king’s
money in his pockets, Koch returned to Alabama in 1848 in hopes
of finding yet another “blood thirsty monarch
of the waters.” His luck held firm and in February 1848 Koch
unearthed his second zeuglodon, this one—after his “reconstruction”—a
modest ninety-six feet long. Again Koch took the creature to
Europe, displaying it in the Royal Academy of Dredsen, where
it was viewed by the entire royal family of Saxony. He also showed
it in Vienna and Prague before returning to America.
In 1853 Koch displayed his
prize, now billed as an “immense
antediluvian monster,” at the Great Southern Museum on St.
Charles Street in New Orleans. Later, he sold his exhibit to his
old museum in St. Louis (now under new management), and in 1863,
that establishment sold the still-larger-than-life beast to Wood’s
Museum in Chicago.
the mid-1850s, Koch ceased his travels and settled down with
his family—wife, three sons, and a
Louis, where the city directory listed him as a “professor
of philosophy.” Now in his fifties, he finally achieved
a measure of the professional recognition that had eluded him
for much of his life. He was elected an associate member of the
Academy of Science in St. Louis, and in 1857 he became a curator
of the Academy. To the end of his life, however, he remained
controversial primarily because of his theories of natural history,
which he espoused in published pamphlets.
In 1847 Koch had published in Dresden
his 162-page travel diary entitled Journey Through a Part
of the United States of North America in the Years 1844-1846, intended
for German readers anxious to learn about America. He had also
published a number of pamphlets in German and English describing
his discoveries, and a ninety-nine-page discourse on the Missouri
fossil elephant. Among his more controversial works were The
Six Days of Creation, or, The Mosaic History of Creation, a 51-page
attempt to prove that the account of creation provided in the first
chapter of Genesis was in complete conformity with geologic findings,
and a paper in the Transactions of the Academy of Science
of St. Louis, in which Koch espoused his long-held theory that early man
and fossil elephants were contemporaries.
For more than a century
following his death in 1867, Koch’s
name was frequently included with those of frauds and hoaxes of
the nineteenth century, but in recent years his observations and
his data—if not his conclusions—have gained respect
in the scientific community.
Of the three great fossil skeletons
Koch discovered, only one survives. His first Alabama zeuglodon,
the one he sold to the King of Prussia, was destroyed by Allied
bombardiers over Berlin in 1945. His second zeuglodon, the one
purchased by a Chicago museum, was destroyed in that city’s
great fire in 1871—an
example perhaps of one fabulous creature, Mrs. O’Leary’s
cow, destroying another.
Fortunately, Koch’s Missourium survives.
Reassembled by the English anatomist Richard Owen, it stands
today in the British Museum (Natural History) exhibited as an
Ice Age mastodon.
In a sense Koch himself fared better than his fossils.
His biographer, Ernst A. Stadler, tells us that “when Albert
body was moved from its original place of interment, a small burying
ground near a vineyard, to the hilltop cemetery overlooking the
Ohio River at Golconda, it was found that the mortal remains of
the indefatigable fossil hunter had petrified.” Mr. Koch,
it seems, had become a fossil. “To how many men,” asks
Stadler, “is granted the privilege of being so consistent,
even after death?”
114-foot-long “sea serpent” he fabricated out of
the bones of more than one individual zeuglodon (fossil whale)—fascinated
the general public on both sides of the Atlantic. Paleontologists,
however, were not amused.
Neither were some newspaper reporters, who claimed
that Koch’s creature was a complete hoax. On March
30, 1855, the Dallas Gazette, Cahawba, Alabama,
printed the following article:
is stated in the newspapers that the famous fossil skeleton
of the zeuglodon, found in Alabama some fourteen years ago
by a German named Koctch, exhibited, in New York, and afterwards
sold to a Dr. McDowell at St. Louis, was lately taken for debt,
and in process of removal fell to pieces and many of the bones
were broken, when the wonderful monster was found to be of
genuine plaster of Paris formation and entirely German origin,
being connected with the primeval epochs only by the raw materials.
from The Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature, & Art,
edited by Spencer Fullerton Baird, 1851.)
evidenced by the crowds that flocked to see the exhibits in Koch’s
St. Louis Museum, fossils generated public fascination and disbelief
in the nineteenth century. In Koch’s day, the fact that fossils
existed at all was a controversial subject for people who took literally
the matter of creation as accounted for in the Book of Genesis. Church
dogma of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe had put
great importance in the concept of Scala Naturae of “Ladder
of Life.” This dictum held that all life on Earth was created
in its present form, from simple to complex, and, because life was
divinely mandated, no imperfect or incomplete forms could exist. Therefore,
no form of life could change or become extinct.
presented with a strange new fossil, proponents of the “Ladder
of Life” theory argued that the creature was not new at all
and that others of its kind existed somewhere, possibly in the
New World, possibly on an undiscovered island.
notion of geologic time provided another burning issue. Sir Thomas
Browne (1605-1682) wrote that “Time we may comprehend, ‘tis
but five days elder than ourselves.” The very idea that enough
time had passed for creatures to have changed or ceased to live
was considered heretical. The declaration in 1650 of Anglican archbishop
James Ussher (1581-1658) that the Biblical creation occurred at
9:30 A.M. on Tuesday, October 23, 4004 B.C. became
a standard marginal comment in Bibles in Europe and the United
States until the latter part of the nineteenth century. Varying
degrees of such beliefs doubtless added to the curiosity of Albert
Koch’s customers in nineteenth-century Missouri.
zeuglodon’s strongly cusped cheek teeth, one of which is
pictured, are similar to those of at least one kind of living
seal which feeds on krill (small shrimp-like crustaceans), a
common food source for some modern whales.
(Engraving from The
Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature, & Art,
edited by Spencer Fullerton Baird, 1851.)
extinct whale-like creatures, known commonly as zeuglodons, were characterized
by long skulls with heavily toothed jaws and a long serpent-like body
unsuited for an open sea habitat. Unlike most of their modern whale
counterparts, the zeuglodons apparently preferred, or were limited
to, relatively shallow water—probably no more than 600 feet deep
and within a dozen miles of the shore—where they fed on schools
of fish and invertebrates. They likely sculled about with their flattened
tails, using their oar-like forelimbs for braking and steering. Zeuglodons
may have been “lurkers,” hanging out around great masses
of seaweed or other hiding places, ready to dart out for a quick meal.
whales found to date fall into one of two rather distinct families—the Basilosauridae,
the “typical” fifty-to-seventy-foot form with massively
large and elongated vertebrae, and the Dorundontidae, fifteen-to-twenty-foot
creatures with much shorter vertebrae. Both groups are characterized
by heavily cusped cheek teeth.
fossil record supports the hypothesis that the distant lineage of zeuglodons
and a number of other large marine creatures included land-dwelling
ancestors a hundred million years earlier. The evidence for this hypothesis
lies in the functionless pelvic structure found in many such fossil
aquatic vertebrates, including the zeuglodons. Its ancestors had legs,
but these were not efficient swimming devices, and those attempting
to occupy a watery habitat so equipped did not survive; therefore,
those lines became extinct. Over a period of millions of years, forms
whose genetic makeup called for modification of limbs into structures
more suited for an ocean habitat gradually replaced less efficient
relatives. By late Eocene times, zeuglodons were the dominant large
vertebrates in the shallow seas then occupying what is now the lower
Gulf Coastal Plain region in the United States, particularly Alabama
of the creature have also been found in strata of equivalent age in
South Carolina, New Jersey, Texas, England, France, and Egypt.
Whales in Alabama
40 million years ago, the southern-most-part of what we now know as Alabama,
Mississippi, Louisiana, and Georgia was covered by a shallow sea. The largest
mammal in that sea was the zeuglodon, one of the earliest whales. When the zeuglodons
died, their bodies sank to the bottom of the sea, where the fleshy parts decayed
or were eaten by scavengers, and the harder parts—the bones and teeth—remained.
course of millions of years, these bones were covered by layers of sediment and
by the remains of other dead animals. Eventually the layers were compacted by
the weight of overlying strata, and the zeuglodon remains were preserved as fossils
in the sedimentary rock.
years later, the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico retreated to its present position,
creating dry land out of what was formerly ocean floor. Exposed to the elements
for the first time in 40 million years, the sedimentary rock began to wear away,
eventually revealing the remains of zeuglodons and other types of marine creatures.
the southeastern United States, remains of primitive whales are found in a layer
of limy clay, less than twenty feet thick, that crops out in a narrow band through
Alabama and Mississippi. Southwest Alabama in particular is considered by many
geologists to contain the finest exposures of zeuglodon fossils in the world.
[Alabama state geologist Eugene Allen Smith (1841-1927) coined the term “Zeuglodon
Beds” for the limy clays containing the fossils of these whales. The term
was employed widely by geologists in the eastern United States well into the
The first sizeable specimen of a zeuglodon was unearthed in Clarke County, Alabama,
c. 1833. Word of the find spread quickly throughout the scientific community,
attracting many notable paleontologists. One of these, Timothy Abbott Conrad,
a member of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, made a number of
collecting trips to parts of Alabama later frequented by Albert Koch. Conrad’s
work, Fossil Shells of the Tertiary Formations of North America, published in
parts between 1832 and 1837, and doubtless read by Koch, includes the description
of many fossil species from a number of south Alabama collecting localities (near
Alabama zeuglodon on map).
Some of Alabama’s fossil sites were so well known during the nineteenth
century that collections of specimens from these localities were shipped to European
museums during the 1830s and 1840s. In a museum in Germany in the early 1950s,
this author recognized an assemblage of shells collected from the famous fossil
beds of the Gosport Formation at Claiborne, Alabama. T. A. Conrad and others
of his era obtained many specimens from this same locality and dozens of others
throughout Clarke, Choctaw, Washington, and Wilcox counties.
the summer of 1961, the author examined a number of fossil bones that
had been discovered by one of his former students in a remote area
in north Washington County. Of particular interest to Jones was a series
of large vertebrae, partially exposed by erosion, that stretched along
the bank of a shallow gully into a nearby cotton patch. In a number
of the freshly plowed cotton rows, he found bits and pieces of bone
and several large teeth, all typical of the zeuglodon.
With the landowner’s permission, the author and several graduate students
from the University of Alabama conducted a major excavation of the site over
a period of three months, in the process uncovering the most complete skeleton
of a single zeuglodon found in Alabama since the late 1800s. Parts of the skeleton—such
as the tail section, weighing a quarter of a ton—were in excellent shape.
Other parts had not survived well. The bones of the lower back were jammed together
and had to be covered with plaster and removed intact; the neck bones were badly
jumbled; and only about half the ribs could be found. But the most seriously
destroyed portion of the skeleton was the skull, which extended into the cultivated
section of the cotton field, where it had been exposed to the farmer’s
plow for a decade.
The excavation team sifted the soil throughout the area and turned up skull fragments,
both tusk-like and strongly cusped teeth, and even large jaw fragments containing
teeth roots. Also found were fossils of small oysters attached to the whale’s
skeleton, indicating that the bones had lain on the bottom of the sea for some
time before they were buried by sediments. Before each bone or fragment was removed
from the ground, it was treated with preservative, given an identifying number,
The excavation site—which turned out to be within one mile of Albert Koch’s “sea
serpent” excavation in 1845—attracted an enormous amount of attention
locally, as word of the discovery spread throughout the countryside. Despite
the unusually hot summer weather, many people, some carrying small children,
undertook the mile-long walk from the nearest gravel road, through rough country,
to gaze at the large, strange bones.
The students working on the crew were pleased to expound at length—not
unlike Dr. Koch—on the importance of the geologic events associated with
the fossil. But not everyone was impressed. After hearing a student “lecture” that
the creature was a fifty-five-foot whale which lived in an ocean that covered
the region forty million years ago, one observer was overheard to say, “Maybe
it is and maybe it ain’t.”
The excavation—the first institutional dig for zeuglodons in Alabama since
the 1890 Smithsonian expedition—also attracted national and international
attention. Stories of the discovery appeared in newspapers throughout the country
and made the front page of the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune.
Albert Koch would have been pleased.
Before the summer was over, the author found remains of at least three other
zeuglodons within a radius of one-quarter mile of the excavation. In one cornfield,
he found a wagon-load of zeuglodon centra (the main part of the vertebra, minus
the neural arch and other structures), which had been plowed around and through
for many years.
More recently, in 1982, the Red Mountain Museum of Birmingham excavated another
zeuglodon specimen not far from the 1961 University of Alabama excavation site.
This specimen proved the impetus for the state legislature’s designation
in 1984 of the zeuglodon as the official fossil of Alabama.
The University of Alabama zeuglodon specimen resides in the Alabama State Museum
of Natural History on the university campus.
Jones, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University
of Alabama from 1969 to 1984, is currently academic vice
president of the University and director of Alabama Museums,
including the W. Bryant Museum and Mound State Monument in
Moundville. Jones, a professor of geology, is also coauthor,
along with John T. Thurmond, of Fossil Vertebrates of
Alabama (University of Alabama Press, 1981), a valuable
reference for workers in vertebrate paleontology and for
fossil collectors and others interested in prehistory, especially
that of Alabama and the Southeast.
In 1961, in a remote area in north Washington County, Jones and several graduate
students uncovered the most complete skeleton of a single zeuglodon found in
Alabama since the late 1800s. That skeleton is now part of the collection of
the Alabama State Museum of Natural History.
Update December 2006: Dr. Jones, now retired, continues to serve the
interests of the Alabama Museum of Natural History and the University of
Eiseley, Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men
Who Discovered It (Garden City: Doubleday & Company,
Kellog, A Review of the Archaeoceti, Carnegie Institution
of Washington, publication no. 482 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie
Institution of Washington, 1936).
C. Koch, Journey Through a Part of the United States of North
America in the Years 1844-1846, translated, edited, with an
introduction by Ernst A. Stadler (Carbondale: Southern Illinois
University Press, 1972).
Koch, “The Discovery of the Remains of a Mastodon in Gasconde
County, Missouri, and the Evidence of Man,” American Journal
of Science, 36 (1839): 198-200.
Gaylord Simpson, “Misconstructing a Mastodon,” Natural
History 37 (1936): 170-172.
T. Thurmond and Douglas E. Jones, Fossil Vertebrates of Alabama (University:
The University of Alabama Press, 1981).
thanks to Raymond T. Rye II, National Museum of Natural History,
Smithsonian Institution, for help in acquiring photographs for
from the UA Museum:
Tuscaloosa Convention and Visitors Bureau and the Alabama Bureau
of Tourism and Travel.
Fossil Whale Cast Acquired by UA Museum
the importance of fossil whales to our understanding of the prehistoric
Alabama landscape, the Alabama State Legislature designated Basilosaurus
cetoides as the state fossil. Only one of many species discovered
in Alabama, the Basilosaurus cetoides represents the great variety
of large and small marine mammals that existed in the southern
half of the state, which lay under the Gulf of Mexico for tens
of millions of years.
In 2005 the Alabama Museum of Natural History acquired a cast of a complete fossil
Basilosaurus. Made of fiberglass and resin composites formed around a steel core,
the lightweight cast can be displayed without a steel support frame, which would
take up valuable museum floor space. The lighter weight allows the museum to
suspend the sixty-three-foot-long fossil cast from a framework above the decorative
ceiling skylight of the Grand Gallery in Smith Hall on the University of Alabama
Like many fossils on display in museums around the world, the cast is a composite
of skeletal elements from a number of different discoveries. The specimen cast
of this Basilosaurus was created by Dinolab, a small family-owned company located
near Salt Lake City. The experts at Dinolab and a variety of paleontological
consultants used fossil skeletal elements recovered from Alabama, Mississippi,
and Louisiana to create the cast. The Alabama Museum of Natural History is using
this extraordinary specimen as a teaching tool for understanding Alabama’s
rich and varied geological history.
For more information about the Alabama Museum of Natural History, visit their
website at http://amnh.ua.edu/.
This page created 12/11/06