The N.H.L.’s newest hockey team unveiled its official name and mascot: an extinct behemoth with fossils at the American Museum of Natural History. Two players made a pilgrimage, Sarah Larson writes.
Kerfoot admired a sixty-four-foot skeleton of an Apatosaurus—what laypeople might call a Brontosaurus. “This thing’s huge, eh?” he said. Durzi turned around. “This was walking the earth at one point,” he said.
“Are you kidding me?” “How many humans, do you think, to take down one of those guys?” Kerfoot asked. “I don’t even want to—I like these guys,” Durzi said. Hypothetically? “Uh, depends. If it was me? Probably just me.” “If it was me, it would be probably ten thousand,” Kerfoot said. “Thirty thousand,” Durzi said. At the Paul and Irma Milstein Hall of Advanced Mammals, Durzi and Kerfoot met Ross MacPhee, an A.M.N.H. mammalogist emeritus originally from Edmonton. “You didn’t like the dinosaurs, did you?” MacPhee asked, with a specialist’s disdain for other specialties. “No, no, of course not,” Durzi said. “We’re ready to see the mammoth.” “The dinosaurs are smaller than I thought, eh?” Kerfoot said. The Mammuthus skeleton was mighty, too: nearly fourteen feet tall, flamboyantly curved tusks, femurs the size of hockey sticks. Durzi and Kerfoot beheld it. “In hockey, you want to have a little bit of fierceness as your emblem,” Kerfoot said. Mammuthus fit the bill: “That is what you want in a mascot.” We might imagine big mammals like the mammoth as “being a little bit of a slower animal, which isn’t great for hockey,” he went on. “But we learned yesterday that they can run up to about twenty-five miles per hour, which is almost as fast as Durz.” “A little bit quicker than me, I would say,” Durz demurred. MacPhee had a quibble. “That’s over a very short distance,” he said. But N.H.L. players, it was pointed out, take quick shifts, averaging forty seconds. Since the Trump Administration’s fifty-first-state hullabaloo began, many Canadians, including Mike Myers and Prime Minister Mark Carney, have adopted a hockey term, “Elbows up”—basically, “Back off, buster”—as a rallying cry. The Utah Mammoth, in an unrelated development, chose “Tusks Up” as its slogan. When would Mammuthus have put its tusks up? “In breeding season,” MacPhee said. “Males undergo—these guys wouldn’t know anything about this—there’s hormonal changes. They go nuts, basically. And fighting is part of it.” Quite fitting. He added, “The tusks are also used for digging for water—anything that a shovel at the front of your face could be good for.” Some hockey teams have incorporated sound effects into their celebratory goal-horn noise—a cannon blast for the Columbus Blue Jackets, a cat’s yowl for the Florida Panthers. Whether trumpeting mammoth noises might join them is “above our pay grade,” Durzi said. MacPhee added that elephants, surely including these extinct varieties, have a huge repertoire of noises, such as “chirp-like sounds”—also fitting for hockey, in which chirping, a.k.a. insulting one’s opponent, is a sport in itself. Unlike most hockey players, Mammuthus was an herbivore. Dentally, MacPhee said, the mammal grew replacement teeth, back to front, throughout its life. Modern elephants can live sixty or seventy years this way, he said: “They never run out of tooth.” “We could use that,” Durzi said. Durzi and Kerfoot had arrived in New York knowing little about mammoths, but that had changed. “Kerf just gave you ‘Mammoths for Really, Really Dumb Dummies,’ ” Durzi chirped. Before they left, he looked up at Mammuthus one more time. “It’s what we are, and, when we’re explaining it to people, we have knowledge about it now,” he said. “Now it’s kind of a part of us.”♦
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