Mastodon Fossil
A particularly important incident in the history of paleontology involves Kaup. In 1854 he bought the American mastodon found in 1799 in Orange County, New York. This is the mastodon immortalized in Charles Willson Peale's painting of the 1801 excavation (painting executed between 1806 and 1808). This mastodon was on display for many years in Peale's Museum and is currently on display in Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt, Germany This mastodon is the first complete example found in the United States, and may be only the second fossil animal ever mounted for display.
Read more about this topic: Johann Jakob Kaup
Famous quotes containing the word fossil:
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)