HOW TO MEET A MEGATHERIUM ON A STREET IN ENGLAND

The Iguanodon and Megatherium acting as supporters to the University of Cambridge's coat of arms, as carved above the archway of one of the entrances leading into the university's Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences (© Keith Edkins/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

It's not every day that you can meet up with a Megatherium – one of South America's giant prehistoric ground sloths – on a street in England, or anywhere else, for that matter, unless that street just so happens to be Downing Street (no, not that one!), in the English university city of Cambridge. For if it is, you can walk along it and gaze up at a Megatherium as often and for as long as you want to. And not just at a Megatherium either, as it will always be in the company of another palaeontological stalwart, the famous ornithischian dinosaur known as Iguanodon. Bemused? Allow me to explain.

Front view of the Sedgwick Museum, situated directly above the university's Department of Earth Sciences (© Sebastian Ballard/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

The Megatherium and Iguanodon in question are a pair of large, ornamental carvings flanking (or supporting, to use the correct heraldic term) the university's coat of arms present above the archway of one of the entrances to the Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences. Also referred to as the Sedgwick Memorial Museum, it is based in Downing Street, Cambridge, and constitutes the oldest of this university's eight academic museums.

Bronze statue of the Rev. Prof. Adam Sedgwick, created by eminent British sculptor Onslow Ford in 1901, which is on permanent display inside the museum at the junction of its two wings (© Sebastian Ballard/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

This museum is named in honour of one of England's most celebrated geologists, the Reverend Prof. Adam Sedgwick (1785-1873), who spent his academic life working at the University of Cambridge, and it was built to honour him and to contain his very sizeable collections of geological and palaeontological specimens, as well as those of English naturalist Dr John Woodward (1665-1728). Woodward was a fellow geologist who had bequeathed to the university half of his collection of over 9,000 specimens amassed by him over 35 years (the university subsequently purchased the other half), together with funds to establish the Woodwardian Professorship of Geology there (and to which Sedgwick was in due course appointed).

Engravings of Dr John Woodward (left) and the Rev. Prof. Adam Sedgwick (right) (public domain)

These collections were all held at that time in what was then the university's Woodwardian Museum, established in 1728, but which would require a much greater capacity if it were to accommodate further additions. Hence the building of a bigger museum, honouring Sedgwick, was duly proposed. After several delays and false starts, the Sedgwick Museum's construction was finally approved on 16 February 1899, under Prof. Thomas Graham Jackson as architect, and was officially opened on 1 March 1904. Built at what was back then a notably expensive cost of £40,000, it now contains the collections of Woodward, Sedgwick, and countless other specimens too, currently totalling around 2 million rocks, minerals, and fossils.

Vintage engraving depicting how the interior of the then Woodwardian Museum once looked, with the skeleton of a giant deer (aka Irish elk) Megaloceros giganteus prominently displayed; it is still on display today in the Sedgwick Museum (public domain)

One of the Sedgwick Museum's most celebrated specimens on display is the very imposing replica cast of a complete skeleton of an Iguanodon bernissartensis, which was donated to the University of Cambridge by Brussels-based palaeontologist Louis Dollo during the late 1880s via King Leopold II of Belgium. At least 38 complete or near-complete Iguanodon skeletons had been recovered from a coal mine at the Belgian town of Bernissart in 1878. Nine of them were subsequently assembled as upright-standing mount specimens for display at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels (a total of 30 Iguanodon specimens can be seen in its Museum of Natural Sciences today), and it was from one of these that the cast prominently on display at the Sedgwick Museum was taken. This famous exhibit in turn explains the choice of an Iguanodon as one of the two supporters carved above its Iguanodon/Megatherium archway.

Vintage illustration of a Bernissart Iguanodon skeleton assembled in upright stance (public domain)

True, the skeleton cast's upright, rearing stance is now deemed to be incorrect (modern-day palaeontological belief holds that Iguanodon adopted a more horizontal stance), but back then this was how science assumed that this very sizeable dinosaur form stood in life, and explains why the archway's Iguanodon carving is also depicted in upright stance (note too the dragonesque series of dorsal triangular spines running down the carving's back – another now-rejected morphological feature). Moreover, being directly inspired by this cast, the museum's logo has always been an upright bipedal Iguanodon as well (it would be too costly and troublesome to change it now, especially as the logo is so well known).

Modern-day artistic reconstruction of an Iguanodon in a more horizontal stance (public domain)

As for the Megatherium: the Sedgwick Museum's collection includes a partial Megatherium skeleton (and also a historic cast of it) that formed part of Sedgwick's original (1840) Woodwardian Museum collection. Moreover, the Sedgwick Museum is closely associated with Charles Darwin, as it houses a number of his scientifically-priceless specimens, and he famously discovered a Megatherium skeleton during his South American voyages, so the choice of this mega-mammal as the second supporter carved over the archway serves as a very apposite visual representation of this museum's Darwin links. In 2009, it curated a major public exhibition entitled Darwin the Geologist, to coincide with the Darwin bicentenary celebrations (Darwin was born in 1809). This exhibition focused upon his early geological research, and it displayed many of the specimens collected during his famous Beagle voyage.

Artistic reconstruction of the likely appearance in life of the Megatherium or giant ground sloth (public domain)

Incidentally, the Iguanodon and Megatherium are not the only prehistoric beasts depicted externally at the Sedgwick Museum. So too is the woolly mammoth Mammuthus primigenius, courtesy of the following detailed relief – present just to the left of the museum entrance whose archway bears the above-noted dinosaur and ground sloth carvings:

Woolly mammoth relief on the outer wall situated just to the left of the Iguanodon/Megatherium archway (© Vysotsky/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 4.0 licence)

The Sedgwick Museum is open six days a week (closed on Sundays and some Bank Holidays), has free entry, and contains countless fascinating geological and palaeontological specimens on public display – click here to visit its official website for full details. So why not wander down Downing Street, introduce yourself to the Iguanodon and meet up with the Megatherium as they stand tall in stately support, before entering the wonderful world of our planet's distant past as encapsulated within this celebrated museum's spectacular array of exhibits and displays?

Side view of Sedgwick Museum of Earth Sciences showing woolly mammoth wall relief and entrance door bearing Iguanodon/Megatherium archway (© Google Earth Maps 2016 – reproduced here on a strictly educational, non-commercial Fair Use basis for review purposes only)

And if anyone can tell me the name of the sculptor who produced the Iguanodon and Megatherium carvings (and presumably the woolly mammoth relief too), I'd be extremely grateful, because I have so far been unable to discover this – many thanks indeed!

Close-up of the Sedgewick Museum's Iguanodon/Megatherium archway, revealing the exquisite detail of its two prehistoric supporters (© Vysotsky/Wikipedia – CC BY-SA 4.0 licence)

HOW A GIANT SNAKE BECAME A SPIKY SEASHELL – WELCOME TO THE MAUSOLEUM OF MONSTERS

One of several artworks by Swiss painter Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) with a cryptozoological connection – Reiter Von Riesenschlange Überfallen ('Horseman Attacked By A Giant Snake'); watercolour, painted in c.1800 (public domain)

In contrast to insidious and infamous zoological frauds such as Piltdown Man and the stuffed mermaids of Oriental origin, many cases of confused taxonomic classification have occurred not through deliberate, predetermined intentions to create non-existent creatures or to lure scientists along false trails, but instead via simple misidentifications. Nonetheless, the results have often been both unexpected and spectacular, but few more so than in the case of the giant venomous serpent of South America's Gran Chaco region. After all, how can such an ostensibly monstrous reptile transform into a spiky seashell of far more modest proportions and far less dangerous attributes?

As I now reveal here in ShukerNature, the story of this astonishing metamorphosis, though largely forgotten today, must surely rate as one of the most extraordinary (and embarrassing) incidents in the entire history of 20^th-Century zoology.

Gran Chaco location on map (public domain)

Deep within the most secluded realms of the mystery beast investigator's mind lies a dark and mournful cemetery, whose gates are for the most part firmly chained and heavily barred. Whenever his speculations and theories aspire to the grandiose and gothic, however, he is forced to tread the shadowy pathway leading to this most dreaded and dreadful of destinations - the mausoleum of monsters.

In this forsaken spot – within this cryptic catacomb of mythological mammalia, apocalyptic archosauria, and other fabulous fauna of every type - no ordinary assemblage of skeletons is ensconced. No, indeed. Here, amongst shattered dreams and mocking illusions, lie the hastily-jettisoned remains of those great zoological discoveries that were subsequently exposed as sorry misidentifications. A faux-pas phantasmagoria, whose forbidding presence within the annals of zoology serves as a stern warning to all cryptozoologists of the perils of premature pronouncement or imprudent identification. Let us tarry a while here, and examine one of its most dramatic examples.

A veritable mausoleum of monsters – an exquisite 19^th-Century engraving depicting some of the Victorian-age prehistoric animal sculptures of Crystal Palace created by English sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins (1807-1894) (public domain)

In 1926, the Proceedings of the Royal Society of Edinburgh published a paper by Prof. Sir John Graham Kerr, at that time Regius Professor of Zoology at the University of Glasgow, in which he described a huge, curved poison fang belonging to a hitherto unknown genus and species of giant snake - which he formally named Bothrodon pridii (with Bothrodon translating as 'furrow-tooth').

Approximately 2.5 in long as measured along the outside of the curve, this fang was truly enormous.

Bothrodon pridii 'fang', pictured in 1926; scale in mm (public domain)

Indeed, as noted by now-retired mollusc expert David Heppell from the Royal Museum of Scotland who documented this specimen in The Conchologist's Newsletter (March 1966), it was roughly nine times longer than that of a 6-ft-long boomslang Dispholidus typus - one of the world's deadliest snakes.

Moreover, it even dwarfed the fangs of the Gaboon viper Bitis gabonica. Native to much of sub-Saharan Africa, this formidable serpent not only is the largest member of the genus Bitis and the world's heaviest species of any type of viperid, but also holds the record for the longest fangs of any known species of snake alive today – up to 2 in long.

Gaboon viper showing its huge fangs (© Brimac the 2^nd/Wikipedia CC BY 2.0 licence)

Accordingly, judging from the relative size of the fang, Prof. Kerr estimated that the total length of its venomous owner, Bothrodon pridii, could have approached 60 ft or so.

Truly a monster, in every sense of the word!

Prof. Sir John Graham Kerr (© T & R Annan & Sons Ltd/Wikipedia CC BY 4.0 licence)

The poison fang had been obtained by one of Kerr's friends, missionary Andrew Pride (after whom Kerr had named this outsized ophidian) from the Gran Chaco's silt-like deposits, which dated back no further than the Pleistocene epoch (2.5 million to 11,700 years ago). Despite a prolonged, thorough search of this locality by Pride for this mega-snake's skeletal remains, however, none were found.

In his paper Kerr concisely described the fang's appearance, including the prominent poison groove running all along its apparent external face, as well as the two narrow parallel stripes, dark-brown in colour, that lay along the distal (terminal) portion of its length. He also discussed the possible phylogenetic relationships of Bothrodon pridii itself, by comparing its fang's morphology with that of contemporary snake species.

The boomslang, an opisthoglyphan snake, depicted in 1838 (public domain)

From these studies, Kerr concluded that the fang most closely resembled those of the opisthoglyphans. This is a group of rear-fanged colubrid snakes that include the boomslang, and which point the way towards the more highly-evolved present-day venomous snakes. In addition, Kerr deduced from the fang's peculiar hook-like shape that, rather than functioning as a striking fang, it most probably served to hold the prey stationary whilst its poison entered the wounds produced by the snake's other teeth in the prey's flesh.

Sherlock Holmes would certainly have approved - because Kerr's paper demonstrated most effectively the considerable amount of information concerning an entire organism (be it serpent or sapient!) that could be obtained by meticulous analysis of only a single component of that organism. Or so it seemed...

Reconstruction of the giant ground sloth Megatherium (public domain) alongside a fossil skeleton of it at London's Natural History Museum (© Dr Karl Shuker)

Kerr duly presented this unique fang to the Hunterian Museum of the University of Glasgow, and in 1933 a cast of it was displayed alongside a label stating that Bothrodon may have fed upon cumbersome plains-dwelling creatures such as the giant ground sloth Megatherium.

Conversely, noted herpetologist Dr Raymond Ditmars suggested small mammals as likely prey in his classic book Snakes of the World (1931).

Dr Raymond Ditmars (public domain)

Nevertheless, Ditmars was palpably impressed by Kerr's discovery and documentation of Bothrodon, exclaiming in his snake book:

It was during the preparation of this manuscript that the author received the greatest surprise in the many years he has studied the serpent clan – and it related to a rear-fanged snake.

Its possible stature also greatly excited Ditmars:

As the poison-conducting teeth of the rear-fanged snakes are short in proportion to the body length, the size of this monster is open to thrilling conjecture...Indeed the thought it inspires rather dulls the conjectural image of that dinosaurian star, Tyrannosaurus, whose races passed away ages before this mammoth Bothrodon prowled the soil.

I'm not quite sure how a limbless creature can be said to prowl; but in any event, as a serpent of substance Bothrodon remained unchallenged – until 1939, that is, when it was unceremoniously dethroned, disgraced, and, worst of all, exposed as nothing more than a snail in snake's similitude!

Chiragra spider conch's shell, underside (© Udo Schmidt/Wikipedia CC BY-SA 2.0 licence)

For Dr W. Quenstedt, after closely examining a coloured cast of the fang sent to the University of Berlin's Paleontological Museum by Prof. Kerr, recognised the specimen's true identity. It was one of those six curved projections, long and groove-bearing, that fringe the large shell aperture of Lambis [now Harpago] chiragra, the Chiragra spider conch - a large and ornate, modern-day species of Indo-Pacific gastropod mollusc! Every feature of the 'fang' confirmed this identity – its size, shape, long groove, brown stripes. There could be no mistake – Bothrodon pridii was no more.

To be fair, however, Kerr's misidentification is not as surprising as it may seem on first sight. After all, he could hardly have been expected to anticipate the discovery within the deposits of Paraguay's Gran Chaco of a shell fragment from a gastropod normally inhabiting the Indo-Pacific oceans.

Bothrodon 'fang' and shell projection from Chiragra spider conch's shell (public domain)

Indeed, this one aspect of Bothrodon's bizarre history remains totally unexplained and seemingly inexplicable even today. How could a section of shell from a modern-day Indo-Pacific mollusc have been obtained in Gran Chaco? David Heppell noted that there is no question that Gran Chaco was the locality involved. Thus, as he remarked, the discovery can be explained only by way of some human introduction.

Notwithstanding this, the survival of Bothrodon pridii within the zoological literature on taxonomic synonyms serves as a stark reminder of just how easily and how far one can travel along the wrong track after having once set foot upon it. Certainly, although many weird metamorphoses have been documented from the animal kingdom, few can surely compare with the transformation of a giant snake into a spiky seashell!

Chiragra spider conch's shell, upper side (© James St John/Wikipedia CC BY 2.0 licence)

As a curious footnote (assuming of course that anything concerning snakes can possess a foot!): even though the re-identification of the Bothrodon 'fang' as a prong from the shell of a Chiragra spider conch was swiftly and fully accepted by the herpetological community following Quenstedt's dramatic denouement in 1939, it is possible that Kerr himself was not so quick to accept this embarrassing revelation.

The reason why I suggest this is that while browsing very recently through Kerr's book A Naturalist in Gran Chaco, first published in 1950 and chronicling the zoological expedition that he mounted during the late 1890s to this vast semi-arid region of southern South America (overlapping northwestern Bolivia, western Paraguay, northern Argentina, and a small portion of southwestern Brazil), I was very surprised to find that although he included just over a page devoted to the Bothrodon specimen's discovery and his studies of it, he made no mention whatsoever of its molluscan re-identification. Equally, however, I can find no mention anywhere of his ever having publicly discounted or disputed this latter taxonomic reassignment of it.

Hardback first edition of Sir John Graham Kerr's book A Naturalist in Gran Chaco (© Sir John Graham Kerr estate/Cambridge University Press – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis only, for educational/review purposes)

So how can we explain this very curious, and conspicuous, absence in Kerr's book, which was first published more than a decade after Quenstedt's fateful, published declaration? As Kerr died just seven years later, in 1957, it is likely that we shall never be able to answer this highly intriguing question with any degree of certainty.

Taxonomically speaking, therefore, Bothrodon pridii may indeed be long dead and buried within the mausoleum of monsters, but perhaps its mystery is not entirely extinguished after all.

My own close encounter with a giant snake… - a magnificent life-sized sculpture by Tim Johnman of a reticulated python at Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia, which I visited in 2006 (© Dr Karl Shuker)

ANTLERED ELEPHANTS - OR UNLIKELY UINTATHERES?

'Antlered elephants' and other North American prehistoric fauna from the Eocene epoch in what is today Wyoming, USA, as depicted in William D. Gunning's book Life History of Our Planet (1881) (public domain)

Have there ever been antlered elephants? Not as far as we know – so how can the extraordinary illustration presented above be explained? The answer dates back to the intense rivalry between two eminent American fossil collectors, resulting in the so-called Bone Wars that galvanised 19^th-Century palaeontology, and focuses upon the subject of one of their most fervent bouts of competitive taxonomic classification – a long-extinct but spectacularly strange-looking group of huge ungulate mammals known as uintatheres.

Uintatheres have always held a special place in my childhood memories because the very first artistic reconstruction of a fossil mammal's likely appearance in life that I ever saw was of a Uintatherium – vibrantly depicted on one of the opening pages of my How and Why Wonder Book of Wild Animals (1962) that my mother bought for me when I was about 4 years old during the early 1960s. I read that poor, long-suffering book so many times and with such youthful enthusiasm that it eventually fell apart, but a replacement copy was soon purchased, which I still own today, so here is that wonderful, fondly-remembered illustration:

Uintatherium depicted by Walter Ferguson in The How and Why Wonder Book of Wild Animals (© Walter Ferguson/Transworld Publishers / inclusion here strictly on Fair Use/non-commercial basis only)

But what are – or were – uintatheres? Named after the mountainous Uinta region of Wyoming and Utah where their first scientifically-recorded fossils were uncovered, they belonged to the taxonomic order Dinocerata ('terrible horns'). This was an early group of extremely large, superficially rhinoceros-like ungulates (but possessing claws rather than hooves), which existed from the late Palaeocene to the mid-Eocene, approximately 45 million years ago. The males of its most famous, culminating members, the uintatheres (which existed during the mid-Eocene), bore no less than three separate pairs of blunt ossicone-like horns on their heads. These consisted of a rear pair arising from the parietal bones near the back of the skull, a middle pair arising from the maxillae or upper jaw bones, and a front pair arising from the nasal bones. Their function remains uncertain, but they may have been used for defence and/or for sexual display purposes. Also, their skull was very concave and flat in shape, and with very thick walls, thus yielding so restricted a cranial cavity that the brain was surprisingly small for such sizeable animals.

Today, two major genera of uintatheres are recognised – Uintatherium and Eobasileus (plus a few less well known ones, such as Tetheopsis) – which are very similar to one another morphologically, and are distinguished predominantly by way of certain differences in skull proportions, as delineated in the following diagram and table. These originate from the definitive work on uintathere taxonomy, North Carolina University palaeontologist Dr Walter H. Wheeler's comprehensive paper 'Revision of the Uintatheres', published in 1961 as Bulletin #14 of the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University.

Skull proportions in uintathere genera (from Wheeler, 1961)

Also, whereas the skull of Uintatherium was relatively broad, with the parietal bones positioned some way in front of the occiput (the skull's rearmost portion), in Eobasileus the skull was long and narrow, with the parietal horns further back and therefore much closer to the occiput.

In addition to their horns, male uintatheres also possessed a very sizeable pair of downward-curving upper tusks (they were much smaller in females), protected like scimitars by bony scabbard-resembling lower jaw down-growths. Behind each of these two tusks was a noticeable gap (diastema), separating the tusk on each side of the upper jaw from that side's first premolars. In Uintatherium, the maxillary horns were positioned directly above the diastema in each side of the upper jaw, whereas in Eobasileus they were positioned further back, above the premolars.

Comparing the structure of a Uintatherium anceps skull at the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle in Paris, France (above) with that of an Eobasileus cornutus skull at the Chicago Field Museum (below) (public domain / © Dallas Krentzel/Wikipedia)

Uintatherium was a massive browsing ungulate, up to around 13 ft long, 5.5 ft tall, and up to 2 tons in weight. Only two species of Uintatherium are recognised today – North America's U. anceps (the most famous dinoceratan of all, formally named and described in 1872 by American palaeontologist Prof. Joseph Leidy), and China's more recently-recognised U. insperatus (named and described in 1981).

Only one Eobasileus species is nowadays recognised – E. cornutus, named by fellow American palaeontologist Prof. Edward Drinker Cope in 1872. This was the largest uintathere of all, and in fact the largest land mammal of any kind during its time on Earth, with a total length of around 13 ft, standing 6.75 ft high at the shoulder, and weighing up to 4.5 tons.

Eobasileus as depicted masterfully and majestically by Charles Knight (public domain)

Just over a century ago, however, a bewildering plethora of uintathere genera and species had been distinguished and named, due not so much to any taxonomic merit, however, but rather to the driven desire by two implacable fossil-collecting foes during the 1870s and 1880s to outdo one another in their febrile quest for palaeontological immortality and to destroy each other's scientific reputation, until their obsession eventually ruined both of them, socially and financially.

Their names? Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899), and Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897).

Othniel Charles Marsh (left) and Edward Drinker Cope (right) (public domain)

After having been professor of vertebrate palaeontology at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Marsh became the first curator at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University (the museum having been founded by his wealthy uncle, the philanthropist George Peabody). Conversely, Cope preferred field work to academic research, as a result of which he never held a major scientific post of any lengthy tenure, though he did become professor of zoology for a time at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, his home city.

Although they are most famous for their frenzied attempts to best one another in the description of new dinosaur species, Marsh and Cope also constantly challenged each another along similar lines in relation to their descriptions of new uintatheres. The regrettable, chaotic result was the creation not only of numerous new species but also of many new genera, several of which were named within the space of a single year, and all of which were unjustified, having been founded upon the most trivial, taxonomically insignificant of differences.

This sorry, farcical state of affairs is preserved today in the startling array of junior synonyms attached to the genus Uintatherium, including the nowadays long-nullified genera Dinoceras (coined by Marsh in 1872), Ditetrodon (Cope, 1885), Elachoceras (Scott, 1886), Loxolophodon (Cope, 1872), Octotomus (Cope, 1885), Tinoceras (Marsh, 1872), and Uintamastix (Leidy, 1872). Although I normally have little interest in abandoned names, I do feel a pang of regret for the loss of one particular example here – the wonderfully-named Dinoceras mirabile (synonymised with Uintatherium anceps), which was coined in 1872 by Marsh, and translates as 'marvellous terrible-horn' – a very evocative, accurate description of how this extraordinary beast would have looked in life.

Uintatherium as portrayed upon a postage stamp issued by Afghanistan in 1988, from my personal collection (© Afghanistan postal service / inclusion here strictly on Fair Use/non-commercial basis only)

But what has all (or any) of this to do with antlered elephants? I'm glad you asked! Because uintatheres were indeed so astounding in form, when their first fossils were discovered palaeontologists were by no means certain which creatures were their closest relatives, and how, therefore, they should be classified. Cope, who was particularly enthralled by them, was convinced that such huge ungulates must surely be related to elephants, and he even opined that they probably possessed a long nasal trunk like elephants plus a pair of very large, wide, elephantine ears, and that they should be housed with them in the taxonomic order Proboscidea, thereby conflicting yet again with Marsh's view (in 1872, Marsh had placed them within their very own order, Dinocerata). But that was not all.

Cope also speculated that their rearmost, parietal pair of horns may have been much larger than the other two pairs, possibly even branched and covered in velvet, thereby resembling the antlers of deer. And so, in various early reconstructions of their putative appearance in life, this is exactly how uintatheres were portrayed – as antlered, large-eared, trunk-wielding pachyderms, resembling the highly unlikely outcome of an equally improbable liaison between an elephant and a moose!

Eobasileus cornutus with elephant ears and trunk , from an August 1873 Pennsylvania Monthly article by Edward Drinker Cope (public domain)

True, there were certain less dramatic versions – one illustration (see above) that appeared in a Pennsylvania Monthly article from August 1873 by Cope concerning the uintathere species now called Eobasileus cornutus portrayed it with tall unbranched parietal horns rather than with parietal antlers (although they are still slightly palmate at their distal edges), but did gift it with an elephant's ears and trunk (as instructed by Cope). However, the two most (in)famous examples of this specific genre of reconstruction were rather more extreme, and both of them appeared in William D. Gunning's book Life History of Our Planet (1881). One of these is the following diagrammatic reconstruction:

Line diagram of a Uintatherium (spelt 'Uintahtherium' here) as an antlered elephant-like beast in Gunning's book (public domain)

Gunning's comparisons drawn between this remarkable creature and various modern-day animals were equally memorable, albeit decidedly fanciful in parts (notably its small brain allying it with the marsupials!):

"We are as astronomers taking the parallax of a distant star. The animal which roamed along the banks of that Wyoming lake is as far from us in time as the star in space. What is its parallax? what its place in the scheme of creation? The long, narrow head with skull elevated behind into a great crest, the molar teeth and arch of the cheek-bone are characters, which indicate relationship with the Rhinoceros. The absence of teeth in the premaxillaries points to the Ruminants. The vertical motion of the jaw points away from the Ruminants, towards the Carnivores. The great expansion of the pelvis, the complete radius and ulna, the shoulder-blade and the hind-foot, are characters which affiliate our animal with the Elephant. The diminutive brain would place it with the pouched Opossum.

"The horns on the maxillaries, the concavity of the crown, and the enormous side crests of the cranium are characters which remove the animal from all living types. We have found the ruins of an animal composed of Elephant, Rhinoceros, Ruminant, Marsu­pial, and a something unknown to the world of the living. Drawing an outline around the skeleton, we have a long head with little horns on the nose, conical horns over the eyes, and palmate horns over the ears, with pillar-like limbs supporting a massive body nearly eight feet high in the withers and six in the rump. Eliminating from its structure all that relates to the living, so many and such dominant structures remain that we cannot choose for it a name from existing orders. We will call it Uintahtherium [sic], which means, the Beast of the Uintah Mountains."

A pair of antlered elephantine uintatheres appeared in this same book's frontispiece illustration, but this time fleshed out rather than in diagrammatic form, as part of an Eocene panorama of North American mammals. The illustration in question opens this present ShukerNature post, and is also reproduced below, together with its original accompanying caption:

The frontispiece illustration of Gunning's book, featuring a pair of antlered uintatheres (public domain)

By the end of the 19^th Century, however, with many additional fossilised remains having been discovered in the meantime, palaeontological views regarding both the morphology and the taxonomy of the uintatheres had changed markedly. Cope's views concerniing them had been totally rejected in favour of Marsh's, thus promoting the belief still current today that these mammalian behemoths represented a lost ungulate lineage, unrepresented by (and unrelated to) any that are still alive in the modern world.

A rather more modern-looking Uintatherium as illustrated in the Reverend H.N. Hutchinson's book Extinct Monsters (1897)

So it was, for instance, that Uintatherium was illustrated in Extinct Monsters (1897) by the Reverend H.N. Hutchinson in much the same manner as it still is now, over a century later, shorn of its velvet-surfaced antlers and with only relatively short and blunt, unbranched horns in their stead, plus much smaller ears, and a conspicuous lack of any probiscidean trunk. The antlered elephant was no more – a most unlikely uintathere had soon become a non-existent fossil phantom blown swiftly away by a brisk, incoming breeze bearing new discoveries and new ideas borne from a new generation of researchers. 'Twas ever thus.

My How and Why Wonder Book of Wild Animals (1962), containing the first Uintatherium illustration that I ever saw as a child (© Transworld Publishers / inclusion here strictly on Fair Use/non-commercial basis only)