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Clarke and Choctaw counties had led him to believe that this particular trip might turn out to be the most exciting and profitable of his career.

Missourium, the mastodon skeleton incorrectly assembled by Koch with several extra vertebrae and ribs and a rakish angle to the tusks, was later purchased by the British Museum and assembled correctly. (From The Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature, and Art, edited by Spencer Fullerton Baird, 1851.)

Profit was a matter of considerable concern to Albert Koch. His museum drew large crowds only when strange and spectacular creatures were displayed, keeping the peripatetic Koch busy searching for new specimens. Noted for its eclectic and curious exhibits, Koch’s museum (admission 50 cents) boasted, among other attractions, striking wax likenesses of President Andrew Jackson and Mexican General Santa Anna, rare stuffed birds, “cosmoramic views” of battles and ancient cities, and an exhibition of the infernal regions. A live grizzly bear and five alligators—one fifteen feet long—thrilled visitors, especially those who hoped to see a fight between bear and reptile. One reptile did manage to fall to his death from a third-floor window one night, creating panic among the few people afoot at the time.

An advertisement in the St. Louis Daily Commercial Bulletin, September 3, 1838, under the intriguing caption “Did You Ever See A Prock?” invited readers to view a creature never before displayed in the Old New World—a stuffed mule-like animal with short, thick legs, bushy tail, and a rhinoceros-like head, horn, and all. P. T. Barnum had nothing on Albert Koch when it came to showmanship.

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To dismiss Albert Koch, however, as simply one of the more ingenious showmen of his day would be unfair. Koch appears to have been a keen observer of geologic phenomena and a competent natural historian, although he was not professionally trained. Even distinguished paleontologists who described Koch’s commercial zeal and labeled him a fossil merchant did not deny that he was a dedicated and persistent man who had succeeded in bringing to light many specimens of fossil vertebrates that otherwise might have gone undetected. The practical side of the matter was simply that Koch depended on the sale of his highly touted specimens to support the acquisition of fossil bones and other “petrifications.” The more spectacular the specimens he found, the more money he made, and the more time he had for fossil hunting.

How Koch came to his curious profession remains unclear, as little is known of his private life. Only through the diary he kept between 1844 and 1846 (published in 1847), and through his obituary and that of his son do we gain any information about him. Ernst A. Stadler, who translated Koch’s diary from the German in 1972, and who uncovered much of the information known about Koch’s life, tells us that he was born May 10, 1804, in Roitzsch, a village of 1,300 in the Prussian Duchy of Saxony. The son of a magistrate and administrator of the royal domain, Koch apparently learned his appreciation for natural history from his father, an avid collector of shells and birds. Given his father’s position in the community, it is likely that young Koch acquired at least a secondary education.

In 1826 Koch, aged twenty-two, arrived in America, apparently settling into the German community in St. Louis, Missouri. By 1830 he was in Erie, Pennsylvania, where he married a Miss Reid of Philadelphia, with whom he subsequently had four children.

All who have ever visited the St. Louis Museum, know that it is kept by a plain man, without a bit of pretense, affectation, or quackery in his composition. His ardor as a virtuoso is equally remarkable as the singleness of his mind and simplicity of his manners. Let Mr. Koch hear that a strange fossil has been exhumed within three or four hundred miles of his residence, and he is sure to be there. No man has been so indefatigable—no man has expended half as much money, time, and labor in exploring and bringing to the light of day the remains of antiquity which have been buried for uncounted centuries in the bosom of our forests and prairies.

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On one trip throughout the Missouri in 1840, Koch received an exciting message. A farmer, in the process of building a mill, had uncovered a number of large fossil bones. Although ill with a fever from “inhaling unhealthy swamp air,” Koch caught the next steamboat up the Missouri River and within six days reached the secluded site. Four months and innumerable hardships later, he emerged with the skeleton of a spectacular Ice Age elephant or mastodon, which he named Missourium in honor of its discovery site.

Missourium was a smash hit at Koch’s St. Louis Museum, in part perhaps because Koch improved on nature a bit. Whether out of anatomical ignorance or commercial zeal, he had assembled the creature’s bones incorrectly, rendering it considerably larger than it had been in life. Koch’s mastodon, an awesome thirty-two feet long and fifteen feet high, contained several extra vertebrae and ribs. Using blocks of wood, Koch had also expanded unnaturally the spaces between the vertebrae, where soft tissue had once resided.

Confident that he had a commercial success on his hands, Koch sold his museum in 1841 and took his prize on the road, touring several cities in the United States, including New Orleans and Philadelphia, before heading for London. Although the general public could not discern Koch’s improvements in Missourium, paleontologists could, and a lively debate sprang up in the scientific community on both sides of the Atlantic as to exactly what Mr. Koch did or did not know about vertebrate anatomy. Apparently unfazed, Koch placed Missourium on display at the British Museum (Natural History), and in 1843 he sold the fossil to that institution for some 1,300 pounds sterling, a very tidy sum in those days.

Reconstructed skeleton of Basilosaurus cetoides (Owen), based on three specimens from Choctaw County, Alabama. Scale bar one meter. The presence of a functionless pelvic structure provides evidence in support of the hypothesis that zeuglodons had land-dwelling ancestors a hundred million years earlier. (From A Review of the Archaeoceti by Remington Kellog, Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1936.)

With the proceeds of the Missourium sale at his disposal, Koch returned to the United States in 1844 and embarked on a two-year odyssey in search of even more spectacular fossils. His travels took him up and down the eastern coast from Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard to New Orleans, to Clarke County, Alabama. It was in Alabama—considered by many geologists to be the most fertile site in the world for hunting fossil whales [see “Fossil Whales in Alabama”]—that Koch uncovered the greatest find of his career: a gigantic whale skeleton. Koch called the creature a sea serpent.


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The object of Albert Koch’s Alabama odyssey had been known to paleontologists since the mid-1830s, when the first bone (a single vertebra) of this previously unknown species of extinct whale was found along the Ouachita River in Arkansas. Dr. Richard Harlan, Philadelphia naturalist, physician, and author of the first systematic treatise on American mammals, examined the bone and declared it that of a reptile, which he named Basilosaurus, or “King of the Lizards.” Subsequently, in Clarke County, Alabama, paleontologists found a more complete specimen of this fifty- to seventy-foot creature, which Harlan described for a scientific publication in 1835.

The huge size of the fossils and their indeterminate scientific affinity soon evoked a lively transatlantic controversy over the exact relationship of the animal. Was it a reptile or a mammal? Did it have characteristics of a dinosaur or a whale?

During the next few years, scientists uncovered similar fossils at a number of localities in the same thin bed of 40,000,000-year-old marine clay that crops out in a narrow band across southwest Alabama and contiguous areas in Mississippi. These fossils were shipped to experts at universities and museums along the Atlantic coast and abroad for examination. Based on the study of these remains, particularly the differentiated teeth, the noted anatomist Richard Owen of London—the man responsible for coining the word “dinosaur” some fifteen years earlier—concluded that the animal was a mammal, not a reptile. Owen named the creature Zeuglodon cetoides, its species name reflecting its proposed affinity to the modern whale order Cetacea.

However, the business of assigning scientific names to creatures includes the principle of priority, that is, the name first applied to an organism cannot be changed. Therefore, the animal’s proper name today is Basilosaurus cetoides (Owen), a designation employing the names of Harlan’s genus and Owen’s species. The term “zeuglodon” is still used as the common name for this diverse group of long skulled, toothed marine mammals thought to be ancestral to some modern whales. The name, based on the peculiar serrated cusps of the molars and premolars, means “yoke tooth” in Greek.

The Alabama zeuglodon, by now a subject of considerable discussion among scientists, also attracted the attention of one of Owen’s British colleagues, the world renowned geologist Sir Charles Lyell. On his second trip to the United States, in 1846, Lyell himself traveled to Alabama to see, among other geologic sights, the much touted outcrop yielding the fossils. The eminent geologist was impressed. In his journal he commented that in a three-day period he probably viewed the remains of not less than forty individual specimens of zeuglodon. In fact, so common were the bones that in parts of Clarke, Choctaw, and Washington counties they created a problem for the farmer’s plow. Slaves piled up the bones around the edges of fields so that crops could be managed more easily. In some places, local farmers had used vertebrae (ten to eighteen inches in diameter and of varying lengths) as foundation posts for houses. (Some zeuglodon vertebrae are still used for house foundations in south Alabama today—a rare case of a useful vertebrate fossil.)

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The rich fossil outcropping in Alabama, of course, had not escaped the attention of the intrepid Albert Koch, who arrived in southwest Alabama in January 1845 and spent the following three months searching for zeuglodon bones. On foot and horseback, he traversed the region around Macon, Clarksville, Coffeeville, St. Stephens, and Old Washington Courthouse. By April he had discovered a number of promising sites and had begun digging. Finally, at a site on the Sinatbouge Creek (a tributary of the Tombigbee River in north Washington County), Koch uncovered the skeleton of an extinct species of gigantic fossil whale, or zeuglodon. He recorded the event in his diary:

…this colossal skeleton lay there connected to the extent that it formed unmistakably a sort of half-circle….the head was completely turned around and…the lower jaw bone was lying approximately 1 foot from it, pressed together in an angle of 45 degrees. In the upper and lower jaw many teeth were still preserved….The front part of the head, consisting of tender bone substance, had suffered the most, as had the upper teeth parts, but of the whole so much still existed that the missing parts could be replaced artificially.

Not unlike his experience with Missourium, Koch collected more bones than a single respectable zeuglodon possessed in life. His “reconstruction” of the Alabama material resulted in a creature of greatly exaggerated size—a source of joy for the curious and a bone of contention (no pun intended) to the paleontological fraternity. What the dedicated fossil hunter had done was to collect various parts of zeuglodon anatomy, representing at least six different animals, and assemble them into a sea monster 114 feet long. Never one to let the lack of scientific knowledge interfere with a commercial enterprise, Koch took his new star on the road.

Albert Koch used this etching of the zeuglodon he constructed on several exhibition pamphlets.

He displayed the monster at the Apollo Saloon in New York City in 1845 and “scientifically” described it in the public program as Hydrargos sillimani. Hydrargos, the genus name, means “sea chief.” The species, sillimani, Koch named in honor of the renowned Benjamin Silliman of Yale, founder of the American Journal of Science. This genuine but commercial dedication soon was scotched by Silliman himself who insisted that the species be named for Harlan, who first described the beast. Always anxious to accede to the requests of his paleontological betters, “Doctor” Koch, as he now called himself, revised the program and doubtless congratulated himself for placing credit where it was due. Meanwhile, the eminent Professor Silliman rejoiced over divorcing his name from such chicanery. The learned Dr. Harlan was by then the late Dr. Harlan and unable to defend himself.

To Koch’s delight, the public reception of Hydrargos was enthusiastic and profitable. Journalists praised the magnificent beast and waxed eloquent as to its nature and origin. The New York Evangelist reporter wrote:

Who knows but he had seen the Ark? Who knows but Noah had seen him from the window? Who knows but he may have visited Ararat? Who knows how many dead and wicked giants of old he had swallowed and fed upon? Perhaps, when we now touch his ribs, we are touching the residium of some of Cain’s descendants, that perished in the deluge.

Another reporter speculated that a meal for the creature would consist of three buffaloes. Koch, who must have enjoyed the publicity thoroughly, encouraged further public excitement in his published program, calling the creature “without exception the largest of all fossil skeletons, found either in the old or new world.” When alive, he speculated, this “blood thirsty monarch of the waters” must have measured “over one hundred and forty feet.”

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Announcement for 1845 New York exhibit of Koch’s Alabama “Great Sea Serpent.”

But not everyone was impressed by Koch’s fossil. Scientists who examined the exhibit in New York criticized the creature’s improbable size and noted that it consisted of parts of more than one individual. They also concluded that the creature was a mammal—not a reptile—agreeing with Professor Owen’s earlier determination. Dissatisfied with this critical scientific evaluation, Koch decided to transport the fossil to Europe for examination by celebrated anatomists and naturalists there.

After changing the creature’s name from Hydrargos, “sea chief,” to Hydrarchos, “sea ruler,” Koch exhibited it in Leipzig and later in Berlin, where King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, “the friend of natural scientists,” requested its display at the Royal Anatomical Museum. Impressed by the exhibit, the monarch subsequently purchased Hydrarchos from Koch, providing him a yearly pension for life. When the museum’s experts examined the specimen, however, they echoed the criticisms of the American experts. The majority of the creature’s bones were those of Harlan’s Basilosaurus, the scientists concluded; the remaining fragments belonged to several new species which were subsequently described in scientific journals by German paleontologists.

Undaunted by the dissolution of his zeuglodon and happy with the king’s money in his pockets, Koch returned to Alabama in 1848 in hopes of finding yet another “blood thirsty monarch of the waters.” His luck held firm and in February 1848 Koch unearthed his second zeuglodon, this one—after his “reconstruction”—a modest ninety-six feet long. Again Koch took the creature to Europe, displaying it in the Royal Academy of Dredsen, where it was viewed by the entire royal family of Saxony. He also showed it in Vienna and Prague before returning to America.

In 1853 Koch displayed his prize, now billed as an “immense antediluvian monster,” at the Great Southern Museum on St. Charles Street in New Orleans. Later, he sold his exhibit to his old museum in St. Louis (now under new management), and in 1863, that establishment sold the still-larger-than-life beast to Wood’s Museum in Chicago.

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In the mid-1850s, Koch ceased his travels and settled down with his family—wife, three sons, and a daughter—in St. Louis, where the city directory listed him as a “professor of philosophy.” Now in his fifties, he finally achieved a measure of the professional recognition that had eluded him for much of his life. He was elected an associate member of the Academy of Science in St. Louis, and in 1857 he became a curator of the Academy. To the end of his life, however, he remained controversial primarily because of his theories of natural history, which he espoused in published pamphlets.

In 1847 Koch had published in Dresden his 162-page travel diary entitled Journey Through a Part of the United States of North America in the Years 1844-1846, intended for German readers anxious to learn about America. He had also published a number of pamphlets in German and English describing his discoveries, and a ninety-nine-page discourse on the Missouri fossil elephant. Among his more controversial works were The Six Days of Creation, or, The Mosaic History of Creation, a 51-page attempt to prove that the account of creation provided in the first chapter of Genesis was in complete conformity with geologic findings, and a paper in the Transactions of the Academy of Science of St. Louis, in which Koch espoused his long-held theory that early man and fossil elephants were contemporaries.

For more than a century following his death in 1867, Koch’s name was frequently included with those of frauds and hoaxes of the nineteenth century, but in recent years his observations and his data—if not his conclusions—have gained respect in the scientific community.

Of the three great fossil skeletons Koch discovered, only one survives. His first Alabama zeuglodon, the one he sold to the King of Prussia, was destroyed by Allied bombardiers over Berlin in 1945. His second zeuglodon, the one purchased by a Chicago museum, was destroyed in that city’s great fire in 1871—an example perhaps of one fabulous creature, Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, destroying another.

Fortunately, Koch’s Missourium survives. Reassembled by the English anatomist Richard Owen, it stands today in the British Museum (Natural History) exhibited as an Ice Age mastodon.

In a sense Koch himself fared better than his fossils. His biographer, Ernst A. Stadler, tells us that “when Albert C. Koch’s body was moved from its original place of interment, a small burying ground near a vineyard, to the hilltop cemetery overlooking the Ohio River at Golconda, it was found that the mortal remains of the indefatigable fossil hunter had petrified.” Mr. Koch, it seems, had become a fossil. “To how many men,” asks Stadler, “is granted the privilege of being so consistent, even after death?”

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Koch’s Hydrarchos—a 114-foot-long “sea serpent” he fabricated out of the bones of more than one individual zeuglodon (fossil whale)—fascinated the general public on both sides of the Atlantic. Paleontologists, however, were not amused. Neither were some newspaper reporters, who claimed that Koch’s creature was a complete hoax. On March 30, 1855, the Dallas Gazette, Cahawba, Alabama, printed the following article: It is stated in the newspapers that the famous fossil skeleton of the zeuglodon, found in Alabama some fourteen years ago by a German named Koctch, exhibited, in New York, and afterwards sold to a Dr. McDowell at St. Louis, was lately taken for debt, and in process of removal fell to pieces and many of the bones were broken, when the wonderful monster was found to be of genuine plaster of Paris formation and entirely German origin, being connected with the primeval epochs only by the raw materials. (Engraving from The Iconographic Encyclopedia of Science, Literature, & Art, edited by Spencer Fullerton Baird, 1851.)

When presented with a strange new fossil, proponents of the “Ladder of Life” theory argued that the creature was not new at all and that others of its kind existed somewhere, possibly in the New World, possibly on an undiscovered island.

The notion of geologic time provided another burning issue. Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) wrote that “Time we may comprehend, ‘tis but five days elder than ourselves.” The very idea that enough time had passed for creatures to have changed or ceased to live was considered heretical. The declaration in 1650 of Anglican archbishop James Ussher (1581-1658) that the Biblical creation occurred at 9:30 A.M. on Tuesday, October 23, 4004 B.C. became a standard marginal comment in Bibles in Europe and the United States until the latter part of the nineteenth century. Varying degrees of such beliefs doubtless added to the curiosity of Albert Koch’s customers in nineteenth-century Missouri.

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About the Author

Doug Jones, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Alabama from 1969 to 1984, is currently academic vice president of the University and director of Alabama Museums, including the W. Bryant Museum and Mound State Monument in Moundville. Jones, a professor of geology, is also coauthor, along with John T. Thurmond, of Fossil Vertebrates of Alabama (University of Alabama Press, 1981), a valuable reference for workers in vertebrate paleontology and for fossil collectors and others interested in prehistory, especially that of Alabama and the Southeast.

In 1961, in a remote area in north Washington County, Jones and several graduate students uncovered the most complete skeleton of a single zeuglodon found in Alabama since the late 1800s. That skeleton is now part of the collection of the Alabama State Museum of Natural History.

Update December 2006: Dr. Jones, now retired, continues to serve the interests of the Alabama Museum of Natural History and the University of Alabama.


Addtitional Information

• Loren Eiseley, Darwin’s Century: Evolution and the Men Who Discovered It (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1958).

• Remington Kellog, A Review of the Archaeoceti, Carnegie Institution of Washington, publication no. 482 (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institution of Washington, 1936).

• Albert C. Koch, Journey Through a Part of the United States of North America in the Years 1844-1846, translated, edited, with an introduction by Ernst A. Stadler (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1972).

• Albert Koch, “The Discovery of the Remains of a Mastodon in Gasconde County, Missouri, and the Evidence of Man,” American Journal of Science, 36 (1839): 198-200.

• George Gaylord Simpson, “Misconstructing a Mastodon,” Natural History 37 (1936): 170-172.

• John T. Thurmond and Douglas E. Jones, Fossil Vertebrates of Alabama (University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981).

• Special thanks to Raymond T. Rye II, National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, for help in acquiring photographs for this article.

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