In 1836, a dime museum opened on the St. Louis riverfront. It boasted many curiosities: stuffed exotic birds, a two-headed lamb, live alligators, a wax figure of then-President Andrew Jackson, and entertainment by ventriloquists and magicians. The most notorious exhibit, though, was a huge skeleton: the purported remains of a beast that, according to one newspaper ad, “made the earth tremble under the step of his feet.” Its name: the Missourium or Missouri Leviathan.
Unveiled in 1840, the skeleton stood about 15 feet high and 30 feet long. (It was so large, a three-piece band was hired to play inside its rib cage.) The bones were not fakes. The museum’s owner, Albert C. Koch, had unearthed them himself.
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Koch, a German-born immigrant, had both a P.T. Barnum–esque flair for spectacle and a passion for fossil collecting. Upon digging up the giant skull just south of St. Louis County, near what’s now Kimmswick, Koch at first surmised that it had come from a mastodon, that close relative of the woolly mammoth that once roamed Missouri. But he noted that its right tusk stuck out sideways and remained in place during the rough ride back to the city. The “correct and indisputable” inference, Koch wrote, was that this was a previously undiscovered animal, a hippo-like beast with the thick skin of an alligator that dived underwater for food and needed flared tusks to protect itself from floating debris. After excavating more large bones in the Ozarks, Koch felt that he had enough to assemble a full mount and displayed the finished product in St. Louis.
Unsatisfied with ticket sales, Koch sold the museum in 1841 and took the exhibit on a tour that ended in London. One visitor there was Richard Owen, superintendent of natural history at the British Museum. He concluded that Koch’s beast was in fact a composite of several mastodon specimens, a mistake that Koch eventually conceded. But Owen was so impressed by Koch’s find that he arranged for the museum to purchase the bones for £1,300 (the equivalent today of about $153,000).
Koch’s next pursuit ended in infamy. He claimed to have unearthed the bones of a 114-foot sea serpent he called “Hydrarchos,” but it too was exposed as a composite. Since then, observers have criticized Koch as incompetent at best and a carnival huckster at worst. Yet scholar Lukas Rieppel has recently argued that “despite his commercial ambitions, Koch was genuine in his commitment to paleontology” and that some respected scientists of the era stood up for him as “a valuable if somewhat naive member of their community.” Koch’s headstone in Golconda, Illinois honors him for digging up “immense things buried in the earth, which now survive as monuments.”
Today, the area where Koch found the tusked skull is protected as Mastodon State Historic Site. As for the Missouri Leviathan, you can still go look at it—albeit reassembled into the anatomically correct form, a mastodon skeleton. It now stands in Hintze Hall of London’s Natural History Museum, where millions of people see it each year.
