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

Images can be quite powerful. They can even resurrect the dead. The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium tells the story of two such images. In 1515, German artist Albrecht Dürer created the first image. It was a woodcut of a rhinoceros that had traveled from India to Portugal as a gift to King Manuel I but recently perished in a shipwreck on its way to Rome. Between 1789 and 1793, Spanish artist and taxidermist Juan Bautista Bru in collaboration with engraver Manuel Navarro created the second image. This image depicted the skeleton of an unknown creature re-constructed from fossilized remains that had traveled from South America to Madrid. There is no direct connection between these two images, their creators, or their subjects. Instead they form the "fantastic binomial" at the core of this historical essay in which Juan Pimentel provides a valuable meditation on the role of images and imagination in the production of knowledge, especially scientific knowledge (6).

Embracing the notion that all knowledge is local, Pimentel provides an erudite yet engaging account of the distinctive features of European culture at "two strategic moments of the modern era" that shaped knowledge and representations of these two creatures (287). In the three chapters devoted to the rhinoceros, we learn how the political symbolism of possessing wild and exotic animals by rulers gave meaning and value to the rhinoceros in early modern court culture. We also learn how the rhinoceros, upon his arrival, confronted extant myths and legends about his kind and his place of origin (the East) preserved in the writings of ancient and medieval authors such as Pliny, Strabo, Abelard and Marco Polo. In the three chapters devoted to the megatherium (giant sloth), Pimentel takes a different approach because, in contrast to the rhinoceros, there was no prior knowledge of this beast, which had been extinct for millennia. Here, he focuses on the cultural significance of the conceptual and material resources used to resurrect and identify the megatherium. We learn about the discourse of monstrosity and how early interpreters of the fossilized remains resorted to this discourse to highlight morphological mystery of a creature with the teeth of an herbivore and the claws of a carnivore. We also learn about the role of bones in medicine and natural history as well as the tradition of osteological illustration that informed the depiction of the reconstructed skeleton. And finally, the essay explores the complex history of the shifting meaning of fossils in light of debates about the geological history of the Earth.

As much as this book highlights the specificities of historical context that shaped knowledge of these two fantastic beasts, the main argument actually challenges the emphasis on locality and discontinuity that has dominated the cultural history of science for decades. According to Pimentel, the juxtaposition of these two "parallel histories" highlights "the affinity in the process of knowledge" and "the continuity of history" (298). The affinity and continuity lies in the analogous roles of images and imagination in the production of knowledge in both cases. As evidence, Pimentel highlights the central irony that the two individuals most responsible for immortalizing these two creatures—Albrecht Dürer and Georges Cuvier—did so without direct experience of their subjects. Dürer based his famous and much imitated image of the rhinoceros not on the animal itself but on someone else's sketch. Similarly, Cuvier's key intuition about the unknown creature from South America (that it was a member of the animal family that included sloths and armadillos) was based not on his direct observation of the remains but through careful study of the images produced by Bru and Navarro. What is remarkable is that Dürer and Cuvier's efforts succeeded "in spite of the doctrine of direct contact and ad vivum presence" that was central to the emerging epistemology of modernity (294). In both cases, imagination provided crucial "distance and...