Beth Shapiro

As a natural historian.

But this pissed Teddy Roosevelt off.

And so he was trying to figure out how he could prove to this guy that American animals were actually better, bigger.

So he was getting his friends to compile lists of things about how American bears are bigger than European bears.

American wolves are bigger than European wolves.

That it isn't that you come to America, like this guy said, and you suddenly get weaker and your blood gets watery.

That's what they thought?

Yeah.

And it was a bestseller, apparently.

That's incredible.

They were probably imagining, I guess when people came over, there were new diseases.

They probably did get sick.

And so there was probably something in it.

So Jefferson went so far as he had a moose sent to this guy's house on his doorstep, but it was partly rotten when he'd gotten there and somebody put the wrong antlers on its head.

It was just really dumb.

But his main feature was mammoths, that he knew that this animal, he didn't think they were extinct at the time.

Nobody really knew about the idea of extinction.

He was convinced that Lewis and Clark were going to find them, that people were going to find these mammoths still there.

And that was going to prove.

What I don't understand about this is how a person who is a scientist can look at how everything has changed in a couple hundred years or in 20 years when it comes to genetics and still say, oh, we know everything.