The biggest mammal on Grounds today is probably a member of our football team. It's unquestionably a member of our species. (Nice try, garbage-gorging squirrels, but you've still got 300 pounds to go.)
Sixty years back, we had some competition. To be honest, we were losing. Badly.
From 1878 to 1948, the University housed a creature that outweighed an entire starting lineup -- a hairy, huge-toothed, towering, eight-ton monster that had, to the local Homo sapiens' good fortune, been dead for 10,000 years.
We had a woolly mammoth.
And we got rid of it! Yeah, I know.
The ungainly critter lodged in one of the more ungainly buildings on site: Brooks Hall, that Gothic colossus that has embarrassed, charmed and bewildered a century-and-a-half's worth of Wahoos. It shared space with the bones of another Pleistocene brute, the South American glypotodon. That's an armadillo the size of a Volkswagen Beetle.
No slight to the art history and anthropology departments -- current Brooks Hall tenants -- but I do think we've now lost a unique recruiting tools. "Come to the University! We've got the hemisphere's largest grazers and rodents."
The bones of the bigger beast came from Siberia, by way of Germany and Rochester, N.Y. They arrived in the United States in June 1877 and quickly regained flesh (plaster) and fur (thought to be Argentine pampas grass). The spiffed-up mammoth took the central pedestal in Brooks Hall's two-story foyer. It made its debut December of that year, and the town's littler mammals couldn't get enough.
A local paper, the (painfully-titled) Jeffersonian, praised every inch of its new and ancient neighbor: it was "the most conspicuous and striking" object in the hall, standing 21-foot-7 tall and 49-foot-2 around, with a trunk stretching no less than 22-foot-8 (that's a good 6 feet longer than a first-year dorm room). So many people came to gawk that the University had to hire a janitor to clean up their tracks.
Through the early days of the 20th century, Brooks Hall remained the place to be on Grounds. Besides its pair of titanic mammals, the museum boasted a plaster dinosaur, casts of fossils of pre-modern man and nearly 25,000 other specimens. It graced postcards and national magazines. It was even worth flaunting to the president of the United States (albeit the less-than-beloved Rutherford B. Hayes).
But -- pity we modern men -- the mammoth's days were numbered. As the sun set on the Victorian age, the museum building started to look démodé, or just downright ugly. "A frieze of Paleolithic monster heads girds its middle height, the symbol of an anachronism producing a discord," proclaimed the 1913 Corks & Curls. No more proud postcards, to say the least.
As for the Paleolithic monster heads indoors, they too faced rough times. Offices and classrooms gobbled up the exhibit space, until at last, in 1948, the mammoth and the glypotodon quite literally returned to dust. It took less than a day to bring the mighty animals down to bits. The Daily Progress, noting their passing, wrote "Prehistoric Monsters Yield Their Space to Virginia Students" (a headline that deserves reprinting whenever New Cabell and the JPA parking lot are finally smoothed over).
And that was that. The end of the age of giant mammals in Charlottesville. True enough, that age was already 10 millennia expired. Truer still, neither mammoths nor glyptodons ever actually roamed Albemarle County. Ludicrous anachronisms they certainly were, and gargantuan wastes of space -- but isn't that rather the point?
Well, extinctions happen on every scale, and there's not much use in complaining. Still, you have to admit, it would be fun to brag, "Sure, our linebacker's huge, but have you seen our armadillo ..."
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