When Portuguese priest Manuel Aires de Casal (1754–1821) found a gigantic bone from a prehistoric animal in the Northeast, he was astonished. He couldn’t understand what type of animal could have possessed ribs “a span and a half wide” and tusks nearly a fathom long, or 6 feet (ft). In the book Corografia brasílica (Brazilian chorography), published in 1817, one of the first publications to record fossils in Brazil, he commented that “it took all the strength of four men” to collect the fascinating animal’s lower jaw.
Casal reports that he remembered hearing of the prehistoric mammoth fossils in North America, but he went on to conclude: “Perhaps this quadruped is [the] Behemoth of which Job speaks in 40:10.” Behemoth was the terrestrial equivalent of the mythological sea creature known as Leviathan, described as having a diet of oxen, “bones like bronze pipes,” and “a skeleton like iron bars.” The description made sense, because he assumed he was also describing an herbivorous animal that was large, heavy, and strong.
In Europe, naturalists and philosophers have debated the possible origins of fossils from animals such as sharks and ammonites, an extinct group of mollusks. The discoveries fueled discussions about the diversity of life on Earth, which led to two hypotheses: major catastrophes could have wiped out ancient species, or animals were slowly replaced by their living relatives. English naturalist Charles Darwin (1809–1882) supported his theory of evolution with fossils found in South America; in Uruguay, he purchased a nearly complete fossil skull of a large mammal, later named Toxodon platensis.
Overseas Historical ArchiveA letter from Montaury describing a package of fossils sent to Portugal in 1784Overseas Historical Archive
In the eighteenth century, when Europe began recognizing the important role that fossils play in understanding the history of life on Earth, French naturalist Georges Cuvier (1769–1832) distinguished the remains of mastodons from those of elephants, but Casal ignored his arguments. According to paleontologist Antonio Carlos Sequeira Fernandes, of the National Museum at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Casal’s interpretations were dictated by his religious views, as he was a priest at the Santa Casa de Misericórdia Hospitals in Rio de Janeiro and in Crato, Ceará. “The bones that he described were from a mastodon skeleton,” says Fernandes, who has been researching Brazil’s paleontological history since the late 1990s.
Closely related to mammoths, mastodons lived between 23 million and 11,700 years ago. They were 10 ft tall, with femurs 3 ft long and tusks averaging 4.6 ft. The jaws Casal described could have had up to thirty teeth, each 17 cm long. “Not knowing what they really were, the first naturalists were quite surprised by the monstruous bones they found,” admits Fernandes.
In the eighteenth century, Casal was not the only one to confuse mastodons with monsters. One of the first records in Brazil of an animal from millions of years ago was made by João Batista de Azevedo Coutinho de Montaury (?–1810), governor of the capital of Ceará. In October 1784, he sent several boxes containing material of scientific interest by ship to the Portuguese minister Martinho de Melo e Castro (1716–1795). One of them contained “six pieces of monstrous bones,” as he described in the letter accompanying the package. Before loading the cargo, Montaury had been surprised by the bones’ similarity to elephant skeletons from Africa, since there was no such “monstrous animal in this part of the Northeast, nor any evidence that there ever was one in this capital to which these bones could be attributed,” he also wrote to his boss.
Fernandes suspected that Montuary’s bones were also from mastodons, but he was never able to confirm this: “I looked at the Ajuda Museum and the Natural History Museum in Portugal, but nobody knew anything about them. They were likely lost.” At least he found where the bones were presumably collected, based on information in the letter to Melo e Castro: a cavity in a rock on a farm in the present-day municipality of Sobral, in Ceará, as reported in a 2013 article in the journal Filosofia e História da Biologia (Philosophy and history of biology).
Dmitry Bogdanov / Wikimedia CommonsAn artistic representation of a saber-toothed tiger, which lived in Brazil around 10,000 years agoDmitry Bogdanov / Wikimedia Commons
The First Collections
Back in the nineteenth century, in the municipality of Prados, in Minas Gerais, enslaved Afro-Brazilians came across a fossilized bone that they hit with a hoe while working in a mine. They thought it might be the remains of a tree. Until they found a tooth. The news reached Luís da Cunha Meneses (1743–1819), governor of the capitals of Minas Gerais and Goiás. In a letter to Melo e Castro, he noted: “I don’t think that such extraordinary news is negligible [¼], so I immediately sent Sergeant Major Pires Sardinha to examine the state and quality of the so-called skeleton.”
Naturalist Simão Pires Sardinha (1751–1808) described what he called the “monstruous bone;” since it was already decomposed, he could not identify the animal to which it belonged, but he also sent it to Lisbon. In Portugal, the material was studied by Italian physician and naturalist Domingos Vandelli (1735–1816), resulting in the first scientific article on Brazilian fossils, published in 1797 in Memórias da Academia Real das Sciencias de Lisboa (Memoirs of the Lisbon Academy of Sciences).
Over time, more precise explanations emerged. At the end of the eighteenth century, physician and botanist Manuel Arruda da Câmara (1752–1810) solved part of the mystery of the first fossils by assembling the first mastodon skeleton from what is now the state of Goiás. The bones were collected during expeditions in the Northeast but were later sent to Portugal and lost.
Smithsonian Institution archives | Valéria Gallo/National Museum-UFRJEdward Cope and an Ellimmichthys longicostatus fossil, which survived the National Museum fire in 2018Smithsonian Institution archives | Valéria Gallo/National Museum-UFRJ
Remains from other animals have also been discovered. In the eighteenth century, Portuguese naturalist and military officer João da Silva Feijó (1760–1824) was amazed by the fish fossils he found among the layers of yellowish rock at the bottom of an ancient lake in Cariri, in the Ceará countryside, now recognized as one of the richest fossiliferous regions in the world. In September 1800, he wrote to Montaury: “A collection of amphibian and fish fossils, the most curious and rare, in my opinion, that have ever been found.”
Feijó was amazed by the exceptional condition of the soft tissues (organs, blood vessels, and muscles) of the “immense fish, completely transformed into crystal.” Fossils from this region of Ceará continue to be found with preserved tissues, feathers, and hair. “Today, 200 years later, we are still studying how fossils preserve their soft tissues,” says paleontologist Ismar de Souza Carvalho, of UFRJ.
Feijó was one of the first to amass a scientific collection of fossils at the Royal Academy of Engineering, in Rio de Janeiro. Naturalists like Frederico Leopoldo Cezar Burlamaqui (1803–1866) from Piauí also assembled their collections. He collected vertebrate and invertebrate fossils for the newly founded Royal Museum (called the National Museum from 1890 onwards), of which he was director from 1847 to 1866. The collection included bird eggs from islands in Peru, fish from Crato, and bones.
Brazilian National Museum-UFRJThe Dastilbe crandalli fish, described in 1910, was common in Chapada do Araripe 120 million years agoBrazilian National Museum-UFRJ
Burlamaqui collected some fossils himself. Others he acquired through donations, such as the femur of a megatherium, a group of sloths about 12 ft tall with strong jaws and long claws that lived throughout South America between 35 million and 12,000 years ago.
With the collection in hand, Burlamaqui dedicated himself to analysis and, in 1855, published the first article on paleontology in a Brazilian scientific journal, Trabalhos da Sociedade Vellosiana. However, many of the labels and descriptions for fossils in his collection have been lost due to poor infrastructure in the early years of the museum and changes in its location. “A large number of fossils, especially megafauna, have no information about their origin,” Fernandes explains.
The records contained in the collection created by American zoologist and paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897) are better preserved. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania in 1861, Cope worked with reptile fossils from North and Central America. One of his colleagues, American geologist Orville Adalbert Derby (1851–1915), who worked in Brazil, collected fossils in Pernambuco, Sergipe, Bahia, and São Paulo and sent what he found to Cope for analysis in the United States, where the materials collected in Brazil by British geologist Samuel Allport (1816–1887) were also sent. “In just one article from 1886, Cope described five fish, two reptiles, and one mammal from fossils found in Bahia, Pernambuco, Sergipe, and São Paulo,” says paleontologist Valéria Gallo, of Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), who studied the so-called Cope Collection at the National Museum.
One of the animals described by the American was the mesosaur Stereosternum tumidum, a marine reptile that lived between 286 million and 258 million years ago. Found on the coasts of South Africa and South America, this group’s fossils confirmed the continental drift theory, proposed in 1912 by German Alfred Wegener (1880–1930). About 80 centimeters (cm) long, with thin conical teeth and a long tail with up to 64 vertebrae, S. tumidum has been found in sedimentary basins in Paraná and South Africa, indicating that the two continents were once united.
Brazilian National LibraryDrawing of the Vampyrops lineatus bat’s skull, from the Lund MuseumBrazilian National Library
Cope also described the crocodile Hyposaurus derbianus. Found in the Northeast, this species’ fossils have a long, triangular jaw and teeth that measure almost 3 cm long. They must have lived between 65 million and 55 million years ago.
The fossils from the National Museum that Cope studied were sold to American geologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935), who deposited them in the American Museum of Natural History, in Washington. They were then sent to the British paleontologist Arthur Woodward (1864–1944). Decades later, at the behest of Brazilian Llewellyn Ivor Price (1905–1980), some of this material was returned to Brazil and remained at the National Museum until it was destroyed in a fire in 2018.
An important name in nineteenth-century Brazilian paleontology and archaeology was Dane Peter Wilhelm Lund (1801–1880). He worked and died in the region of Lagoa Santa, Minas Gerais. “On his expeditions, Lund collected over 10,000 fossils, mostly of megafauna from the current period, the Quaternary [which began 2.58 million years ago], such as saber-toothed tigers, giant sloths, and horses,” Carvalho says.
Lund’s tigers were from the Smilodon populator species, estimated to be 10 ft long, weighing 900 pounds, with sharp, curved, and serrated canine teeth up to 30 cm long. The tiger lived throughout the Americas between 700,000 and 11 million years ago—in Brazil, in the present-day states of Ceará, Sergipe, Mato Grosso do Sul, Bahia, and Minas Gerais. Lund described the cat’s complete skull, whose two canines and incisors (other front teeth) were preserved. Most of what he collected in Brazil is at the Copenhagen Zoological Museum in Denmark.
“The first collections, like Lund’s, still serve as a reference for those who want detailed accounts of the species that lived in Brazil thousands or millions of years ago,” says UERJ paleontologist Hermínio Ismael de Araújo Júnior, president of the Brazilian Paleontology Society (SBP). The first discoveries also indicate the location of paleontological sites, and they are valuable for tourism.
IORI, F. V. Historical Biology. 2024Skull and artistic representation of the Caipirasuchus catanduvensis crocodile, discovered during road construction in the São Paulo countrysideIORI, F. V. Historical Biology. 2024
Since Montaury, naturalists and paleontologists have identified hundreds of species of Brazilian fossils—at least 55 dinosaurs alone. Every year, more animals are discovered and published, such as the titanosaur Tiamat valdecii (see Pesquisa FAPESP issue n° 341) and the crocodile Caipirasuchus catanduvensis, both described in 2024.
A large part of the fossil collection was lost in the fire at the National Museum, but there are other important collections at institutions such as the universities of São Paulo (USP), Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), Pernambuco (UFPE), and Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) of Minas Gerais and the Museum of Earth Sciences in Rio de Janeiro.
The story above was published with the title “When monsters become fossils” in issue 343 of September/2024.
Scientific articles
FERNANDES, A. et al. Histórico da paleontologia no Museu Nacional. Anuário do Instituto de Geociências, Vol. 30. July 27, 2007.
FERNANDES, A. et al. Na ribeira do Acaraú: João Batista de Azevedo Coutinho de Montaury e a descoberta documentada de megafauna no Ceará em 1784. Filosofia e História da Biologia, Vol. 8, no. 1. 2013.
FERNANDES, A. et al. Manuel Aires de Casal, o beemote de Jó e o registro das ocorrências fossilíferas brasileiras no início do século XIX. Filosofia e História da Biologia, Vol. 8, no. 2. 2013.
GALLO, V. et al. A “Coleção Cope” e os fósseis na Estrada de Ferro da Bahia – São Francisco. Filosofia e História da Biologia. Vol. 18, no. 1. June 28, 2023.
