Pictures: The Presidents’ Natural Specimens

Leopard Menace

Photograph courtesy Donald E. Hurlbert, Smithsonian Institution

This skull belonged to an old male leopard (Panthera pardus) believed to have been killing and eating women near Mount Kenya (map) in Africa in the early 1900s.

The large male was caught and killed on a scientific expedition begun by Theodore Roosevelt, in partnership with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, just three weeks after he left office in 1909.

When expedition members neared the town of Meru in Kenya, they heard stories about a leopard that had begun terrorizing the local people about a month or two before to their arrival.

"All they knew when they arrived is it had definitely killed and partially or completely eaten one woman and attempted to attack another and was driven off," said Paige Engelbrektsson, a research assistant in the division of mammals at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.

Members of the expedition, led by Roosevelt and naturalist Edmund Heller, set a trap and caught a large, thin male leopard.

Heller shot it in the head—the bullet hole is visible just behind the eye socket—and upon further examination found that the old male's teeth were cracked and that two of the premolars were shattered, said Engelbrektsson.

"He probably wouldn't be able to chew meat normally or hunt well," she said. And so the male switched to easier prey—humans.

"[Big predators] of any kind don't just randomly go 'I'm going to start killing humans today,'" Engelbrektsson said. "They're driven off of their normal prey … typically because they're old and they aren't able to hunt properly, or because they have dentition issues where they can't eat properly."

The leopard skull was one of more than 5,000 mammal specimens the former President and the museum's researchers brought back from their yearlong expedition.

February 17, 2013

Jefferson's Giant Claw

Photograph courtesy Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University

Presidential interest in the natural world stemmed in part from fierce pride in America.

The hand bones of the giant ground sloth (Megalonyx jeffersonii), pictured above, played a part in refuting a 19th-century French hypothesis known as "North American degeneracy," said Ted Daeschler, curator of vertebrate zoology at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University in Philadelphia.

The hypothesis argued that everything in North America was weak—that nothing grew strong, the atmosphere was bad, and that the soil was barren.

As governor of Virginia, then later as an ambassador and Vice President, Thomas Jefferson spent years gathering evidence to refute those claims.

He was particularly interested in sending specimens of large animals, including the bones and antlers of a moose, to Europe to demonstrate the vitality of his country. And the enormous hand bones of the ground sloth fit nicely into Jefferson's efforts.

Discovered in a cave in what is now West Virginia, the fossils were sent to Jefferson in 1796 as a gift from Col. John Stuart. Based on their size, Jefferson thought the claws might belong to a giant carnivore, such as a lion or a panther.

Months later Jefferson realized that his Megalonyx was actually a sloth when he compared the fossils to drawings of similar specimens found in South America.

Jefferson called the animal Megalonyx, or "giant claw," in a presentation to the American Philosophical Society in 1797, and eventually published a scientific paper describing the animal in 1799.

In 1822 the giant sloth was formally named Megalonyx jeffersonii in honor of the man who first described it.

February 17, 2013

Dinosaur Dilemma

Photograph by Bill Ray, Time Life Pictures/Getty Images

When paleontologist Paul Olsen (pictured left, in 1970 at 17 years old) first started looking for dinosaurs in 1967, he never dreamed that he'd end up the subject of White House memos between President Richard Nixon and his senior advisers.

Or that one of the dinosaur footprints he discovered would find its way into a presidential collection.

But that's exactly what happened when Olsen and his friend Tony Lessa (right) successfully lobbied for the creation of a park in 1970 near Livingston, New Jersey (map).

The future park, located in a quarry owned by Walter Kidde Precision Instruments, was a budding paleontologist's dream.

The area was covered in dinosaur footprints, such as ones made by Eubrontes gigantis (pictured), and some of them were more than 200 million years old.

"The footprints are very well preserved in that particular spot," said Olsen, now at Columbia University in New York. And the arrangement of some of them—many small footprints associated with one larger set—indicated behaviors that included parental care, he said.

It took Olsen and Lessa two and a half years to get the area designated as a park, but once they did, an Olsen family friend started writing letters to the White House to see if the boys could meet the President.

"[Presidential speechwriter] William Safire said he didn't want President Nixon to be associated with the concept of a dinosaur," said Olsen. The White House staff discussed this while dealing with the Vietnam War, going so far as to write memos on the situation, he said.

Olsen and Lessa never got their meeting with the President. But Nixon ended up sending the teenagers presidential commendations.

Olsen sent the President a cast of the E. gigantis footprint as a thank you. The cast now resides at the Nixon Presidential Library and Museum in Yorba Linda, California.

The actual footprint fossils, stored in a shed at the park, have walked off. "No one knows what happened to them," Olsen said.

February 17, 2013

Hat Trick

Photograph courtesy Donald E. Hurlbert, Smithsonian Institution

Theodore Roosevelt captured this montane vole (Microtus montanus nanus) with his hat while touring Yellowstone Valley in 1903. It is the only known natural history mammal specimen collected by a sitting U.S. President.  (Get underneath Yellowstone in this National Geographic magazine article.)

Roosevelt was on a sled drawn by horses when he saw some movement off to the side, said the Smithsonian's Engelbrektsson.

The President jumped out of the sled and swept up a small rodent using his hat, according to naturalist John Burroughs, who accompanied Roosevelt on his tour.

The President then proceeded to demonstrate to the group how to prepare the skin and skull for preservation.

"Right on the spot, he got to work and did a lovely job," said Engelbrektsson. Roosevelt sent the specimen to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

February 17, 2013

Incognitum

Photograph courtesy Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University

In Thomas Jefferson's quest to disprove the European notion that the inhabitants of North America, including humans, were weak and puny, he enlisted mastodon bones (pictured) as an aid.

As President, Jefferson tasked William Clark, of the Lewis and Clark expedition, to collect these enormous fossils from Big Bone Lick in Kentucky in order to complete a mastodon skeleton.

The 1807 expedition was so successful—Clark brought back over 300 bones—that Jefferson was able to ship three large boxes of the fossils to France, where they were displayed in the Museum of Natural History.

The remaining bones were split between Jefferson's home at Monticello and the American Philosophical Society. The Society transferred their bones to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia in 1849, where many still remain.

February 17, 2013

Billy

Photograph courtesy Brittany M. Hance, Smithsonian Institution

In 1927 Henry Firestone, founder of the famed tire company, gave President Calvin Coolidge a pygmy hippopotamus (Choeropsis liberiensis) as a gift.

Coolidge sent the pygmy hippo, named Billy, to the National Zoo on June 10, 1927.

A member of a species endangered in the wild, Billy got to work and fathered 24 offspring, but only 12 lived past a year old.

Billy's descendants were sent to zoos around the world, including Sydney, said the Smithsonian's Engelbrektsson.

As of a 2002 pygmy hippo studbook, 49 pygmy hippos lived in North America, nine of which traced their roots back to Billy, she said.

When the animal died on October 10, 1955, his skull (pictured) was sent to the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.

February 17, 2013