Yes, I’m well aware that “peccary” sounds like a Victorian prophylactic. But a peccary, gentle reader, is a prehistoric pig. Some thrive to this day in warmer climes. The curiosity is the presence of quite a few Platygonus compressus in an urban cave in St. Louis.
In 1946, George Gaylord Simpson, a paleontologist so famous that Isaac Asimov cited him with reverence, unearthed peccary skeletons entombed beneath the Lemp and Chatillon-DeMenil mansions. The pigs had been there at least 20,000 years, arriving long before Laclède and Chouteau—long before the Osage, even. And they were not, in point of fact, pigs: Their tusks were alarming but mainly used to slice roots. The gentle vegetarians stood maybe 20 inches at the shoulder.
A persnickety, frail little man with ginger hair that left his head early and lips that thinned as he aged, Simpson looked a bit like a stern leprechaun, but he knew his stuff. He’d found dinosaur bones. Hunting fossils in Patagonia, he’d discovered heavy-legged, tailless creatures that all seemed to have died screaming, maybe as a volcano erupted. (He named them Scarrittia, in honor of the expedition’s wealthy backer.) In the next decade, he’d discover eight skulls of Eohippus, the “dawn horse,” which turned out to be one of the prehistoric ancestors of our Derby contenders.
By the time the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion’s owner presented him with a mysterious bone, Simpson was chair of geology and paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. He dropped everything, flew to St. Louis, and set up camp, turning the mansion’s first floor into a bone laundry and shellackery where he and his crew processed nearly 3,000 bones for study. The owner, Lee Hess, hoped to turn the cave into a tourist attraction, so he’d ordered removal of the stiff, wet clay blocking the passages. Out had tumbled the contents of a mass grave.
What had happened to kill them all at once? “The animals probably fell into a sinkhole or fissure somewhere near the cave,” Simpson decided. “The bones of many animals, hundreds certainly and perhaps thousands, piled up in this sinkhole or fissure and were buried there in mud and clay that washed over their bones. The accumulation—clay, bones, and all—was somehow washed into the cave.”
Simpson gleefully wrote up his find in Natural History Magazine, noting, “Extinct animals are rarely found in the heart of a great city.” He then returned to New York, but one trusts that he regaled the rest of the world with our peccary thereafter. He’s said to have chatted, after all, with the Duke of Edinburgh, the granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and Louis Leakey.
Today, the cave’s entrance is closed. Let the pigs rest.
