How Do They Do That? - A Natural History of the New World - page 158

still lived in unexplored parts of the world. In an 1818 letter to Francis
van der Kamp, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “It may be doubted whether any
particular species of animals or vegetables which ever did exist, has ceased
to exist.” He had expressed the same view more than twenty years earlier
in a letter to John Stuart: “I cannot however help believing that this ani-
mal [megalonyx] as well as the Mammoth are still existing” (both letters
cited on the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia site, http://wiki.monticello
.org/mediawiki/index.php/Species_Extinction). Jefferson charged Lewis
and Clark to be on the lookout for such life-forms during their explora-
tion of the American west. Ordinary citizens coping with daily survival
and hardships were probably either unaware of these debates or gave them
little thought. For those who did concern themselves, the uncertainty rep-
resented by fossils likely emphasized the potential dangers of the present
and the precariousness of the future, furthering hopes for protection by
supernatural forces and creating dreams of an easier and just afterlife. It
also afforded opportunity for the unscrupulous to exploit these fears by
threats of punishments on Earth, visions of an eternity in hell, promises
of an eternal life, and the practice widely used by church leaders and their
representatives of selling dispensations (salvation) to the frightened and
gullible.
The “works of the devil” hypothesis became increasingly popular as Ly-
ell and other geologists provided uncomfortably convincing evidence for
the great antiquity of the Earth and its life. Contemporaneously, Darwin
and other biologists were offering plausible arguments for evolution, also
involving eons of time, through geographic (reproductive) isolation, com-
petition, and natural selection acting on the variation observable in sexually
reproducing populations.
Proponents of a biblical fl ood and believers in God's limitless creativity
claimed to have found support for their views in the fossil record when
in 1789 Johann Jacob Scheuchzer (1672-1733) discovered a specimen at
Oehningen, Switzerland, in deposits now known to be Miocene in age. He
called the fossil specimen Homo diluvii testis (man testifi es to the fl ood).
It was some two or three feet long with large eye sockets on the top of a
fl attened head and a tail. Almost no one accepted the specimen as being a
fossil human, but its assignment to the genus Homo speaks volumes about
early views on the nature of fossils, efforts to explain the ancient world,
and errors that can result from interpreting evidence a priori to support
strong beliefs. Cuvier in 1812 recognized it as an amphibian, and Holl in
1832 named it Andrias scheuchzeri , an extinct member of the “hellbenders”
group of giant salamanders. The specimen was purchased by Martinus van