The interesting saga of fixing the secret of this historical animal who as soon as roamed the north country—and has captivated our collective mind's eye ever since.

Today, we all know sizeable is an extinct kind of elephant that was once lined with lengthy fur and lived within the north nation throughout the ice a long time. yet how do you determine what a massive is that if you haven't any proposal of extinction, ice a while, or fossils? lengthy after the final significant died and was once now not a part of the human nutrition, it nonetheless performed a job in human lifestyles. Cultures worldwide interpreted the continues to be of mammoths throughout the lens in their personal worldview and mythology.

When the traditional Greeks observed deposits of big fossils, they knew that they had came upon the conflict fields the place the gods had vanquished the Titans. whilst the chinese language found buried ivory, they knew they'd came across dragons’ tooth. yet because the Age of cause dawned, monsters and giants gave strategy to the clinical process. but the secret of those effective bones remained. How did Enlightenment thinkers triumph over centuries of fantasy and false impression to reconstruct an unknown animal?

The trip to resolve that puzzle starts within the 1690s with the arriving of latest kind of ivory at the eu industry bearing the unique identify "mammoth." It ends throughout the Napoleonic Wars with the 1st restoration of a frozen gigantic. the trail to realizing the significant used to be traveled through retailers, diplomats, missionaries, cranky medical professionals, creditors of common wonders, Swedish POWs, Peter the good, Ben Franklin, the inventor of scorching chocolate, or even one pirate.

McKay brings jointly dozens of unique files and illustrations, a few overlooked for hundreds of years, to teach how this strange collection of characters solved the secret of the sizeable and, in doing so, created the technological know-how of paleontology.