From a military expedition to the cabinet of king Louis XV

The amazing story about the birth of vertebrate paleontology in North America

Abstract

The French and Indian War confronting the North American colonies of the British Empire against those of the French, each side being supported by various Native American tribes, began with a dispute over control of the Forks of Ohio river. Some events that occurred in the summer of 1739 in this river, led to the birth of American vertebrate paleontology. In June of that year the major of Montreal Charles Le Moyne, Second Baron de Longueuil, was sent in a military expedition to aid the French colony of Mississippi, to repel the pro-British Chickasaw Indians who were besieging the area and blockading the Mississippi. During a stop of this military expedition along the lower Ohio River, a party of Abenaki Indian hunters’ canoes went out searching for food to fed the army, camped along the river. When they arrived back, the Indians unloaded a strange cargo of an enormous fossilized femur, several huge molars, and a great ivory tusk. Later, and recognizing the importance of these fossils, Longueuil sailed crossing the Atlantic to France, reaching Paris in late 1740. The fossils were placed in Louis XV’s cabinet of curiosities (du cabinet du Roi), under the direction of French naturalist Count Buffon and Louis Daubenton. A few years later, the fossils collected from the Ohio River by the unnamed Indian hunters in Longueuil’s army, made scientific history, becoming the first American fossils ever studied by scientists, marking the official birth of the American vertebrate paleontology. Today, these famous fossils, belonging to Mammut americanum are still preserved in the collection of the Paleontology Laboratory at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.