The research history of Mammut is extensive given its complicated taxonomic and non-taxonomic histories, with the earliest recorded fossil finds dating back to 1705 in Claverack, New York during the colonial era of what is now the United States of America. Initially thought to belong to biblical antediluvian giants, the fossils were later determined to belong to a proboscidean species as a result of more complete 18th century finds from the locality of Big Bone Lick in what is now Kentucky. The molars were studied by European and American naturalists, who were generally baffled on its lack of analogue to modern elephants, leading to varying hypothesis on the affinities of the teeth. More complete skeletons were found after the independence of the United States colonies from Great Britain within the early 19th century. American historians of the 21st century have made arguments that the early history of M. americanum finds and studies played major roles in shaping American nationalism on the basis of the large sizes and relative completeness of the fossils to disprove the negative theory of social degeneracy in North America.
Taxonomically, the mammutid was recognized as a distinct species by Robert Kerr in 1792 ("Elephas" americanus) and as the genus Mammut by Johann Friedrich Blumenbach in 1799. Mammut is one of the first fossil mammal genera to be erected with valid taxonomic authority. However, naturalists of the 19th century generally adopted the name Mastodon, which was established as an informal term in 1806 and as a genus in 1817 by the French naturalist Georges Cuvier. "Mastodon" for its taxonomic history served as a wastebasket taxon for any fossil proboscidean species whose dentitions appeared closer to Mammut americanum than to those of the Elephantidae or Deinotheriidae. The genus Mammut and its type species M. americanum have both accumulated plenty of junior synonyms as a result of species oversplitting.
After major taxonomic revisions of proboscideans within the 20th century, Mammut was recognized as the prioritized synonym over Mastodon and no longer as regularly served as a wastebasket taxon. In addition, more species names were recognized over the course of the 20th–21st centuries based on fossils from western North American localities, although most were initially classified under the junior synonym Pliomastodon. Today, Mammut is well-recognized for its abundant fossil evidence in the case of M. americanum (or "American mastodon") and is frequently displayed in natural history museum institutions.
"Giant's" teeth and bones finds
The earliest account of known fossils of Mammut dates back to 30 July 1705 when The Boston News-Letter described an account, dating to 23 July 1705 in New York, of teeth and a bone of a "giant" uncovered from the town of Claverack, New York. The newspaper stated that it was large-sized, weighed over , and was dug up some to underground from a river bank or hill. It also reported that they uncovered a femur (reported as a "thigh bone") and another flat, broad tooth with a length equivalent to four fingers of a human, but both crumbled shortly after being uncovered before they could be observed by anatomical experts. According to Louisiana State University professor Donald E. Stanford in 1959, the news brought great excitement to some people of the time as they saw it as potentially proving the existence of antediluvian giants as chronicled by the Bible.
Further details regarding the history of the tooth from 1705 were provided in a letter dated to 1713 (although likely written earlier) when Edward Hyde, 3rd Earl of Clarendon (known also as Lord Cornbury), communicated his report from New York to the Royal Society, a learned society of Great Britain. In his subjoined letter, Lord Cornbury wrote that he sent them the "tooth of a Giant" from a Virginia fleet, desiring that it be sent to Gresham College. According to the English aristocrat, the tooth was found near the side of the Hudson River by a Dutch country-fellow and was sold to New York General Assembly member Van Bruggen for a gill of rum. Bruggen showed the tooth to several other people, including Lord Cornbury, and was originally going to dispose of it due to its perceived worthlessness. However, he instead gave it to Lord Cornbury, who speculated that it may have a tooth of a giant as opposed to a beast or fish. He then stated that he sent Johannis Abeel, a recorder of Albany, New York, to dig near the original site of the tooth to find more bones. A later letter by Abeel reveals that he traveled to Claverack where the original bones were found. He said that workers uncovered bones of a corpse that was about thirty feet long but that almost all decayed, as most broke into pieces as soon as they were handled. Author Paul Semonin said that the accounts written by Cornbury and Abeel match up with that written by the correspondent of The Boston News-Letter.
In a diary entry by Edward Taylor dating to the summer of 1706, the writer wrote that a Dutchman named Koon brought to his house a fist-sized tooth different from that in Claverack that weighed over . Semonin suggested based on known primary sources that the Dutchmen from Albany were traveling around the American colonies with their items, later visiting Massachusetts governor Joseph Dudley in July 1706 to show him the tooth. In a letter to his friend Cotton Mather, he wrote about his experience with the two Dutchmen and reaffirmed his opinion that the tooth belonged to the biblical giants.
Cotton Mather used the accounts from The Boston News-Letter and the letter from Dudley to communicate about the large bones and teeth to the English naturalist John Woodward in an account dating to 17 November 1712, which were referenced in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society journal in 1714. In it, he reinforced the theory that the teeth and bones belonged to antediluvian giants that were apparently once present in the New England region.
According to Semonin, England's naturalists shifted away from the idea that the large fossils were of humanoids, an idea created by the advent of a discoveries of preserved Siberian mammoths and subsequent comparative anatomies to extant elephants. In addition, a mammoth tooth recovered from South Carolina in 1724 or 1725 was described by Mark Catesby in a journal dating to 1743 as identified by North American slaves from Africa as belonging to an elephant, marking a shift away from identifications of fossils as belonging to human giants.
Big Bone Lick fossils
In 1739, a French military expedition under the command of Charles III Le Moyne (known also as "Longueil") explored the locality of "Big Bone Lick" in what is now Kentucky, an area previously known by Native Americans. Le Moyne gathered an assortment of fossil bones and teeth from the locality. The discovery of the locality by Le Moyne's military was part of a military campaign against the Chickasaw nation as part of the Chickasaw Wars in the 18th century. Upon his return to France in 1740, Le Moyne deposited a large femur, a tusk, and three molars in a collection of the Cabinet du Roi in the French botanical garden Jardin des plantes. The erroneous date of 1729 instead of 1739 as the year that Le Moyne uncovered fossils was the result of a rewritten note for a map of eastern North America that listed the wrong year. A different account by French officer Jean Bernard Bossu recorded that in 1735, his Canadian military party recovered several skeletons of "elephants" from the site, leading him to believe that the proboscideans may have wandered off from Asia to North America.
In 1762, French naturalist Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton reported that he examined the fossil collection brought by Longueuil from the Big Bone Lick and compared it with a Siberian femur and bones of extant elephants. Daubenton said that the bones were discovered by Native Americans (probably Abenaki hunter-warriors) who found them on a marsh's edges and took them to Longueuil's camp in Ohio territory as a gift. He came to the conclusion that the femur and tusk belonged to an elephant while the three molars were unlike those of true elephants and therefore came from a separate giant hippopotamus. Today, the molars are identified as belonging to M. americanum.
The same year, several Native Americans of the Shawnee tribe brought a large tooth and a tusk to Henry Bouquet presumably as a gift to tie with British authorities after a long time of hostility due to the French and Indian War. Bouquet wrote to John Bartram about the large fossils, believing that elephants had formerly existed in North America. Bartram contacted Quaker naturalist James Wright about the tooth and tusk fossils at Fort Pitt. Using an interpreter, Wright learned from two Shawnee individuals that there were five entire skeletons of mammutids lying with their heads pointing towards one another. They believed that the five proboscideans were all killed by a lightning strike. When Wright asked them if they had ever seen them alive, the Shawnee interviewees responded that nobody had ever seen the creatures alive due to the bones having been observed as ancient. In Shawnee tradition, the mammals roamed in herds and were hunted by giants, who both eventually died out. The accounts told by the Shawnee individuals in 1762 are the oldest known documented interpretations of the Ohio fossils, although the traditions may have had been told for generations based on careful fossil observations.
The prospects of the Big Bone Lick also attracted Irish trader George Croghan, who collected some bones on his journey down Ohio before then being attacked by a group of Kickapoo and Mascouten members, resulting in several people on Croghan's party being killed and Croghan being captured. He was eventually released, although he lost his fossil collection in the process. He later recollected enough fossils to send to both William Petty, 2nd Earl of Shelburne (or Lord Shelburne) and Benjamin Franklin in 1767. Croghan was thanked by both Franklin and his friend Peter Collinson the same year for the fossils, leading them to question why so many proboscidean fossils were preserved in the Big Bone Lick site and how they were apparently present in North America in the first place. Collinson in one of his scholarly papers concluded that the peculiar grinders (the molars) were built for herbivorous diets of branches of trees and shrubs as well as other vegetation, a view later followed by Franklin.
Scottish anatomist William Hunter described fossils of the mammutid from the Midwestern locality in 1768, recalling that French naturalists thought of the bones as belonging to elephants. Hunter agreed that the tusks were like those of elephants, but he and his brother John Hunter observed that the teeth were not like those of modern elephants. He determined that the "grinders" from Ohio were of a carnivorous animal but believed that the tusks belonged to the same animal. After examining fossils from Franklin and Lord Shelburne, Hunter was convinced that the "pseudo-elephant", or "animal incognitum" (shortened as "incognitum"), was an animal species separate from elephants that might have also been the same as the proboscideans found in Siberia. He concluded his article with the opinion that although regrettable to philosophers, humanity should be thankful to heaven that the animal, if truly carnivorous, was extinct. Semonin argued that Hunter's usage of the word "extinct" for the fossil animal was controversial, as it pushed the ideas that the extinction of the "carnivorous" animal was a blessing for the human race and that wild animals and "inferior" human races were subject to extinctions over "superior" human races under the will of God's creation.
Early American observations