David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive Page #2

is going to escape - for now.

As well as its millions of specimens

of animals and plants,

the museum also has huge

and fascinating archives,

scientific journals from all over

the world, letters from explorers,

even posters and handbills

if they have anything

to do with natural history.

In the 19th century,

when Professor Owen

was in charge of this museum,

new and extraordinary things were

turning up from all over the world

and Professor Owen was very keen that his

museum should have the best of them.

He secured the Archaeopteryx

from Germany,

the moas from New Zealand,

but sometimes, really strange things

turned up on his very doorstep.

And there were certainly lots

of very odd creatures

being exhibited around London

in Victorian times.

This print shows

an extraordinary monster

that was being displayed

in Piccadilly.

An American showman called

Albert Koch

was charging a shilling a head

to have a look at it.

Professor Owen decided

to investigate.

He felt sure

that something was wrong with it,

but nonetheless, he was intrigued,

and he bought it.

When he'd got it back

to his museum,

he was able to examine it

in detail.

It was certainly gigantic

and bigger than anything else

he had in his museum at the time.

Koch, the showman,

had dug up the bones from

a farmer's field in Missouri

and maintained that in life,

the animal had stood 9 meters long

and almost 5 meters tall.

There were claims that this

was a fearsome predator,

that used its extraordinary tusks

for stabbing its victims,

presumably by swinging its head

sideways.

Well, I'm sure Professor Owen

would've had something

to say about that.

He must have realised

that these blunt, rounded ridges

on these huge molar teeth

would be very effective

at grinding up twigs and fir cones

and rough forest vegetation,

but they lack the sharp blade

that you need

to slice through flesh.

This is not the jaw of a carnivore.

It soon became clear

that Koch had increased the size

of his monster skeleton

by adding extra vertebrae, ribs

and even blocks of wood.

The Missouri Leviathan was a fraud.

So Owen removed all the extra bits.

And then he put the real bones

back together in their true form.

Finally, he detached

those astonishing tusks

and put them back

in the correct way.

It seems obvious now,

but in life,

they had pointed in much

the same direction

as those of a modern elephant.

And so, here today

stands not Koch's leviathan

but Owen's mastodont

a vegetarian relative

of the elephant

that lived 12,000 years ago

in North and Central America.

It may have decreased a bit in size,

but it's still

an astonishing animal.

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