The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium: An Essay in Natural History by Juan Pimentel (review)

The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium can be classified as a microhistory, or rather two microhistories, focusing on two distinct historical events separated by nearly 300 years. In 1515, a rhinoceros arrived in Lisbon. Ganda, as the rhinoceros was known in his native India, survived for less than a year after his arrival in Europe, drowning in a shipwreck on his way to Italy as a gift to the pope. In 1788, another specimen arrived in Madrid: the bones of what appeared to be an enormous unknown animal, found on the banks of the River Luján in what is now Argentina and was then a territory of imperial Spain.

Pimentel's sprightly and witty account of these two events, ably translated from the Spanish by Peter Mason, explores the implications of these two animals, one alive, one long dead, for the science, art, and politics of early modern Europe, and for the role of imagination in science. The author's heroes are Albrecht Dürer, who promulgated a myth, and Georges Cuvier, who exploded one. Ganda became immortalized in Dürer's famous engraving of a heavily armored animal that continued to be reproduced for centuries. In 1796, Cuvier identified the fossil bones from the River Luján as a prehistoric sloth he called Megatherium americanum.

In true microhistory form, Pimentel takes each of these discrete events and traces radiating stories around the central creature. Ganda's story encapsulates Portuguese exploration in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the trade in exotic animals and their captivity, and the important diplomatic role such animals played. Pimentel explores what was known about the rhinoceros (not much) and compares Ganda to other contemporary pachyderms, including the pope's white elephant, Hanno. He vividly recounts the staged combat between Ganda and one of Portuguese king Manuel I's elephants.

Ganda's uniqueness and fame made him the perfect diplomatic gift from Manuel I to Pope Leo X. Manuel had already sent Hanno to Rome in 1514, where he was drawn by Raphael and widely feted. The rhinoceros would, Manuel believed, lead to even more papal favour bestowed on Portugal. Alas, it was not to be; his ship foundered on the Italian coast early in 1516, and all aboard drowned.

Ganda reached his greatest fame in death, in the hands of Albrecht Dürer, whose drawing and subsequent engraving of the rhinoceros was among the most widely distributed images of the era; it shaped the iconography of the beast for centuries. Yet Dürer never saw Ganda, and based his image on verbal accounts. Pimentel relates the story of this image and its afterlife in what is the best chapter in the book, deeply engaging with current historiography in the history of science around the role of print and images in the production of knowledge.

The second half of the book begins with the discovery on the River Luján and recounts the travels of these enormous bones, in seven large crates, to Madrid, where Juan Bautista Bru, the taxidermist for the fledgling Royal Museum of Natural History, attempted to reassemble them. History has treated Bru harshly for his ham-handed reassembly of the bones into what he believed must be a carnivorous beast; as Pimentel relates, "the list of materials used to assemble it speaks for itself: wire, polish, pitch, glue, white powder, cork, a hand saw, and files" (144). Nonetheless, the engraving of the assembled skeleton became the basis for its ultimate identification.

The second half of the book examines skeletons and palaeontology, two subjects that became charged with scientific and political meaning in the period between 1760 and 1830. The discovery of the "American incognitum" (later identified as a mastodon) in Ohio in the 1760s and what Thomas Jefferson called the Megalonyx in Virginia in 1797 challenged theories of the age of the earth and of the inferiority of New World fauna. Pimentel...