Around 1725, a crew of enslaved people digging in swampy ground along South Carolina’s Stono River discovered something unusual: an enormous fossilized tooth. The find puzzled the group’s enslavers, who suggested it was a remnant from the biblical great flood. But it looked familiar to the excavators, who noted its resemblance to the molar of an African elephant—an animal they’d encountered back home in the Kingdom of Kongo.
“They must have thought, ‘Well, we have them in Africa, [and] I guess they have them here, too,’” says Adrienne Mayor, a folklorist and historian of ancient science at Stanford University. “It must have been exciting for them.”
Scholars don’t know these individuals’ names or any other details of their lives. It’s possible some participated in the Stono Rebellion, the largest uprising by enslaved people in British North America, which took place on the river’s banks in 1739. But they unearthed and essentially correctly identified some of the first mammoth fossils discovered in the Americas. (Later analyses indicated the tooth, one of several found at Stono, belonged to an extinct Columbian mammoth, a relative of modern-day elephants.) These molars became key evidence in scientists’ nascent theories of extinction and evolution, decades before paleontology—the study of fossilized plants and animals—was formally established as a discipline.
Enslaved people’s contributions to paleontology continued well past the Stono dig. Similar teeth dug up by enslaved workers in Virginia in 1782 made their way to Thomas Jefferson’s desk at Monticello. The president later directed Meriwether Lewis and William Clark to search for living examples of gigantic creatures on their 1804 voyage to the Pacific Northwest.
Stories like these, of the enslaved people who helped kick-start paleontology and the Native American guides who led naturalists to fossils around the continent, have long been suppressed. In recent years, however, young paleontologists have pushed their field to reckon with its whitewashed history by recognizing early finds made by Black and Indigenous people.
“Looking into the past at this history of how early paleontology was conducted and how the original discoverers’ voices are almost lost, … I want to give credit where credit is due to all the folks [who] assisted in making those amazing discoveries,” says Pedro M. Monarrez, a paleobiologist at Stanford University and the lead author of a 2021 paper on racism and colonialism in Western paleontology.