Jefferson's Big Lion

Excited as a hungry terrier was Bryan Patterson when erosion revealed a deposit of old bones in a pasture near London Mills, 111. Out of the glacial blue clay came parts of a hind leg, pelvis, forefoot, vertebrae, a molar tooth. Back in Chicago's Field Museum, where he is Assistant Curator of Paleontology, Patterson pieced the fragments together. Last week he announced that he had one of the finest fossil ground sloths discovered in the U. S. since 1796. In that year the huge, extinct beast was first studied and named Megalonyx by a great U. S. paleontologist, Thomas Jefferson.

When Colonel John Stuart found some fossils in a Virginia cave, he naturally sent them to Monticello where Jefferson was known to include old bones among his strange (and, folk said, atheistic) interests. In 1797 Jefferson described the fossil creature before the American Philosophical Society (of which he was then president) as a kind of enormous lion because of its eight-inch claws. Wrote he: "I cannot . .. help believing that this animal, as well as the mammoth, are still existing." When Jefferson sent Lewis and Clark up the Missouri River and Captain Zebulon Pike into the Rockies, he half-hoped they might bag a live one.

This was not completely silly. Megalonyx jeffersoni is so recent that its bones sometimes bear wisps of hair. Paleontologist Patterson thinks that cave men helped to exterminate the creatures though "an embrace from a sloth would have made a bear's hug look like child's play." In expecting to bag a Megalonyx, Jefferson was not "wrong by more than a few thousand years." As bone-diggers measure time, this was only day before yesterday.

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