All-American Monsters–Part 5 (A Very Big Cheese)

It was only the world's second reconstruction of a fossil species (the one prior attempt being a decidedly less thrilling giant ground sloth in Madrid), and it became a national sensation, with word spreading until "the masses of the people were now even more eager than the scientists to view the great American wonder," according to Peale biographer (and descendant) Charles Coleman Sellers. "The mere idea of bigness stirred every heart." Peale's "mammoth" would turn out to be a mastodon, but ...