America's Founding Monsters

LM Meeting Room, Libbie Mill Area Library. Dinosaurs may be well known fossil animals from the United States and most of the rest of the world today, but they were not known to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, or the other founding fathers. Instead, these founding fathers all collected the fossil remains of a mysterious beast that roamed the American colonies. Known as the American incognitum, this mysterious creature had sharp, knobby teeth of gigantic size—perfect, or so Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin thought—for a fierce, meat-eating animal. As more fossils were discovered, and especially after Charles Willson Peale exhumed a complete creature, these ancient remains were finally seen as representing a mastodon, an ancient elephant relative that ate plants and not animals. Join Dr. Bernard K. Means of Virginia Commonwealth University’s Virtual Curation Lab as he discusses why the founding fathers were obsessed with mastodon fossils and the comic book he co-created with artist Maggie Colangelo entitled Founding Monsters.