SCRAPS OF INFORMATION AND THE AFFINITIES OF SOUTH AMERICAN MAMMALS IN THE EARLY 19TH CENTURY

PODGORNY IRINA

Pittsburgh

Simposio; Linnaean Worlds: Global Scientific Practice during the Great Divergence; 2012

World History Center

This paper describes the itineraries of the so-called pink fairy armadillo or pichiciego in the first half of the nineteenth century. American physicians working for the Argentine revolutionary army in the 1810s found this small living mammal in the Andean slopes of Mendoza and shipped its fragments to the natural history cabinets of Philadelphia. Covered by a scaly cloak, its anatomy united features from several different animals: armadillos, pangolins, hedgehogs, and sloths. It was named Chlamyphorus truncatus by Richard Harlan in Philadelphia, and was soon understood to be related to another South American animal of equally contested anatomy: the extinct genus Megatherium, which for some years was conceived to be a giant pichiciego-like extinct animal. Late in the 1820s, the British consul in Buenos Aires procured new specimens of both animals. While the small living animal was shipped as a complete specimen preserved in alcohol, the skeleton of the extinct giant from the Pampas dispatched to London was composed by fragments gathered in different spots of Buenos Aires. In England, both Megatherium and Chlamyphorus were believed to have common anatomical characteristics (including their shell, the shape of their foot), as well as a sort of paradoxical character at the crossroads of art and nature. For the historian they also share something crucial is: they were both defined by scraps of information that circulated through networks created by the recently-arrived agents to the new South American republics. In a context of permanent reformulation of the mammal classificatory system and the question of how to relate extinct and extant animal forms, Megatherium and Chlamyphorus were related to a series of different animals. Moreover, they were both created by the recording practices of public servants, the instructions of colonial administrators, and the flow of papers and freight aboard commercial and transportation vessels. Thus, while some anatomists tended to relate Megatherium to the South American armadillos and sloths, other French anatomists conceived the fossil mammal as a pangolin, a class of scaly mammals from the tropical regions of Asia and Africa. This paper will argue that the affinities and the place of these both animals as mammals depended on the territories which were represented in museum collections, the availability of specimens, and the extent of networks of exchange. The paper will discuss the unstable character of these zoological entities, whose integrity depended on and, at the same time, was threatened by the gathering and combining of scraps of information. In that sense, the addition of meaning and the incremental aspects of knowledge circulation should not be read either in positive terms or as driven by nature, like the idea of scientific progress tends to interpret them. Rather, Megatherium and its allied genera speak more to the contingency of knowledge as a force that ultimately connects fragments that are scattered all over the world.