Science: Jefferson's Big Lion

Excited as a hungry terrier was Bryan Patterson when erosion revealed a deposit of old bones in a pasture near London Mills, 111. Out of the glacial blue clay came parts of a hind leg, pelvis, forefoot, vertebrae, a molar tooth. Back in Chicago's Field Museum, where he is Assistant Curator of Paleontology, Patterson pieced the fragments together. Last week he announced that he had one of the finest fossil ground sloths discovered in the U. S. since 1796. In that year the huge, extinct beast was first studied and named Megalonyx by a...

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