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Sloth and EnterpriseBones and their superhuman purveyor
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The trick-or-treater at left is a 15-foot-long, extinct ground sloth, Lestodon armatus, at the Museum of Comparative Zoology, part of Harvard's Museum of Natural History. Ground sloths, which could be the size of elephants, were galumphing, powerful mammals of the Western Hemisphere. They walked on all fours, but could rear up to grasp trees with their long, sharp claws. They were vegetarian, a good thing for prehistoric man, of whom they were contemporaries in the Pleistocene, which began about two million years ago.
In June of 1889, Professor Henry A. Ward sent a telegram costing $93.60 from Buenos Aires to Alexander Agassiz, head of the museum, offering him for $3,500 the unmounted bones of Lestodon, Mylodon (another giant ground sloth), and Glyptodon. Yes, said Agassiz, probably paying for the bones with his own money, for he was a major benefactor of the museum his father, Louis, had founded. An 1896 article reported that Ward had sold $70,560-worth of scientific specimens to Harvard.
In the museum booklet "About the Exhibits," authors Max and Elizabeth Hall give a brief biography of the indefatigable Ward. Born in 1834 in Rochester, New York, he was assistant to Louis Agassiz at Harvard in 1854, then continued his studies in Paris, selling fossils to European museums to pay the bills. In his thirties, a professor at the University of Rochester, he founded Ward's Natural Science Establishment, which would become a world-famous supplier of scientific specimens and the omphalos of taxidermy in America. He sent men on costly collecting expeditions to distant lands, and over the years he himself made about 50 ocean voyages. (Lestodon was a traveler, too; it developed in South America when that continent was an island, but crossed to North America when the Isthmus of Panama appeared.)
An admirer of Ward's fortitude judged that "internally he is composed of raw-hide, whale-bone and asbestos," for no ordinary human could have withstood 45 years of bad food, bad drink, and the many other hazards of traveling all over creation. Near home, in Buffalo in 1906, while readying himself for yet another expedition to South America, he was killed by a horseless carriage.