Artisans of the (Prehistoric) Body: Anatomy, Craft, and the American Incognitum

Between the 1730s and the 1760s, a number of large bones were found in the Ohio River valley. They were widely believed to be the remains of ancient elephants that had been washed to North America by the Deluge; Buffon and Daubenton also concluded that these were elephant bones. In the 1760s, some of these bones came to London, and to the attention of the anatomist William Hunter (1718-1783). Hunter drew on a wide circle of acquaintances, including collectors, naturalists, fellow anatomists, and craftsmen in ivory, and determined that the bones were not from elephants but from another larger elephant-like animal that was now extinct. His conclusions, published in the Philosophical Transactions in 1768, were among the first to acknowledge the fact of extinction.