Megatherium

It’s what’s (not) for dinner

Among the many eclectic things I have in my collections of curiosities are trading cards published by a German chocolate company about 1905. Hundreds of millions of such cards on various topics were published in Germany in the late 1890s and early 1900s, and these here, measuring 27x19 cm (10.5x7.5 inches), are two of 90 cards in three series of 30 each. About 1988 I found a stack of about 20 cards from among the three series at an antique mall in Golden, Colorado, at $5 for the pile, and of course I had to have them. Today you can find individual originals for sale at anywhere from $15 to more than $200 each.

The Tiere der Urwelt (“animals of the primeval world”) cards are chromolithographs of reconstructions of animals ranging from Permian horseshoe crabs to late Tertiary giant sloths, like the Megatherium on the two different cards here. The title of one, Riesenfaultier, just means “ground sloth.”

Jean Léopold Nicolas Frédéric, Baron Cuvier (1769 – 1832), better known as Georges Cuvier, was a French naturalist often called the founding father of paleontology, and he also essentially established the science of comparative anatomy. Using methods comparing fossils to modern animals, he devised connections that were frequently correct, as in his recognition that Megatherium was a giant sloth. He also named the pterodactyl and mastodon, but was also noted for his strong opposition to the concept of evolution, thinking rather that observable variations resulted from cyclic destructions and creations of species.

Megatherium was the size of an elephant, 6 meters (20 ft) long. It lived in the grasslands and woodlands of South America, ranging from Peru through Bolivia and Paraguay into Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile. The first fossils were found in Argentina in 1788.

Megatherium existed by about 3.6 million years ago (Chimento and others, 2021, A new record of Megatherium (Folivora, Megatheriidae) in the late Pliocene of the Pampean region (Argentina): Journal of South American Earth Sciences 107: 102950) and was extinct about 12,000 years ago. Megatherium extinction coincided with the Quaternary extinction of many mammals in the Americas, both gigantic and smaller, in an event whose origin is controversial but is often linked to the human peopling of North and South America. There is one known site in South America where Megatherium was slaughtered and butchered by humans (Politis and others, 2019, Campo Laborde: A Late Pleistocene giant ground sloth kill and butchering site in the Pampas: Science Advances, Mar 6;5(3):eaau4546). One such discovery does not an extinction make, of course.

The drawings on my 1905 cards show a shaggy animal, but today Megatherium is thought to have been largely hairless, like elephants, in order to reduce overheating (Fariña, 2002, Megatherium, the hairless: appearance of the great Quaternary sloths (Mammalia; Xenarthra): Ameghiniana, 39 (2): 241–244). Many of the reconstructions shown on these cards are incompatible with modern versions, but they were reasonably accurate at the time.

Theodore Reichardt Chocolate Company of Hamburg, c. 1905-1910.

The Theodore Reichardt Chocolate Company of Hamburg, which published these cards, was one of the largest producers of chocolate in the world until World War I. The artist for the images was Heinrich Harder, and the back of each card had explanatory text written for a popular audience by Wilhelm Bölsche.

Megatherium figures in two more modern connections as well. The Megatherium Club at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. was organized in 1857 by zoologist William Stimpson. According to a report by the Smithsonian, other members included herpetologist Robert Kennicott, paleontologist Edward D. Cope, ichthyologist Theodore Gill, geologist and paleontologist Fielding B. Meek, and Ferdinand Vendeveer Hayden, the geologist who explored much of the US West, including Colorado, Yellowstone, and parts of Montana, in the years before the US Geological Survey was established.

The members of the Megatherium Club lived at times in the Castle of the Smithsonian Institution, where they got drunk, had sack races in the halls, and would serenade the daughters of the Secretary of the Smithsonian outside the windows of his neighboring home.

The other story is the famous rumor that in 1951 at a meeting of the Explorers Club, noted for serving exotic cuisine at its annual dinners, Megatherium meat recovered frozen from Alaskan permafrost was on the menu. The story also suggests that frozen wooly mammoth was served, which at least was realistically possible; Megatherium was well known to be native only to South America.

The story was usually taken to be apocryphal and simply a tongue-in-cheek report (but just possibly true) of the typically exotic activities of the Explorers Club, whose members have included the likes of Robert Peary, Roald Amundsen, Sir Edmund Hillary, and Neil Armstrong. But in 2016, a specimen of meat from that 1951 dinner was rediscovered and its DNA sequenced. It proved to be green sea turtle, Chelonia mydas (Glass and others, 2016, Was Frozen Mammoth or Giant Ground Sloth Served for Dinner at The Explorers Club?: PLoS One, 11(2): e0146825). The whole thing was “an elaborate publicity stunt” that evolved into a perception of reality, now debunked.

No Megatherium meat for you!!

Today is the day the earth was created, according to Bishop James Ussher of Dublin, Ireland. His analysis of the Old Testament was published in 1654. In that work, he determined that creation took place on October 23, 4004 B.C. The exact time of day is somewhat debated.