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Animals Old and New. Multiple Perspectives on the Meaning of Beasthood

What a bewildering cacophany of competing voices, what an explosive mixture of incompatible world-views, the topic of wild animals generates both in academia and in the popular imagination! This latest clutch of contributions to a genre with roots in remotest prehistory exemplifies the perennial potency of beasthood as a mirror of human consciousness and a reflection of our continual strivings for self-understanding. Paul Semonin has an extraordinary real-life tale to tell. His account of the discovery in 1705 of the petrified remains of a huge unidentified creature in the Hudson River valley shows how its problematic significance helped to define issues no less portentous than the American sense of nationhood and continental and global destiny. Soon afterwards the fossil