When 2,240-ton cats roamed the earth!

Looks legit, right?

Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre's 1884 book Mission des Juifs was finally translated into English in 2018 by Simha Seraya and Albert Haldane. They released two versions: a simple translation called Mission of the Jews and an annotated one called The Golden Thread of World History. I bought the latter, which as turned out to be a mistake. So far, I would estimate that at least 90% of the footnotes simply implore the reader to read The Urantia Book (published decades after Saint-Yves's death, and therefore textually irrelevant!), and none of them shed any useful light on the text itself. (The translation itself is also amateurish in the extreme, but it's unfortunately the only game in town.)

Among the many confusing passages the translators did not see fit to annotate at all is this one about prehistoric animals:

The mammoths, the ten-meter-tall behemoths, the five-meter-long Brazilian lion, the twenty eight meter-tall felis smilodon, the diornis bird as big as an elephant, the ornitichnithès, a still more colossal bird, judging by its strides of three meters, all those beings who have returned to the invisible are but signatures of their indestructible celestial Species, the symbols of the biological and purely intelligible Powers of the Cosmos.

"Behemoths"? Is that supposed to refer to some specific animal? And since when have there ever been lions of any description in Brazil? And, wait, did you just say a 28-meter-tall Smilodon?

Those less familiar with the metric system might not have an intuitive sense of how completely ridiculous that is, but what we're talking about here is a saber-toothed tiger as tall as a nine-story building, five times the height of a giraffe, 65% taller than Sauroposeidon proteles, the tallest known dinosaur. Sauroposeidon was so tall because of its ridiculously long neck, but a cat's height is measured at the shoulder.

Smilodon populator, the saber-toothed tiger we all know and love, was 1.4 m tall and 2.6 m long. It weighed about 280 kg, and its namesake teeth were 30 cm long. Scaling up, then, this hypothetical S. alveydreii with a height of 28 m (92 ft) would be 52 m (170 ft) long, weigh 2,240 tons (heavier than 20 blue whales), and have canine teeth 6 m (20 ft) long. Forget being taller than a giraffe; this thing would have had teeth the size of giraffes!

I finally just had to look up the original (qv):

Les mammouths, les mastodontes, de dix mètres de haut, le lion du Brésil de cinq mètres de long, le félis smilodon de vingt-huit mètres, le diornis, oiseau grand comme un éléphant, l’ornitichnithès, oiseau plus colossal encore, à en juger par ses enjambées de trois mètres, tous ces êtres rentrés dans l’Invisible ne sont que les signatures de leur Espèce céleste, indestructible, ne sont que les symboles de Puissances biologiques et purement intelligibles du Kosmos.

So the "behemoths" in the English version are mastodons. Why on earth would they change that perfectly clear word to the vague behemoths -- at the same time leaving untranslated such an opaque term as ornitichnithès?

Now, about those crazy measurements.

Were mastodons 10 meters (33 feet) tall? No, of course not. They were 10 feet tall, about the same as a modern elephant. Saint-Yves must have read something in English about mastodons and misunderstood the units being used.

The "lion du Brésil" is a tougher case, as no lions, living or fossil, have ever been discovered in that country or (probably) anywhere else in South America. (It has recently been proposed that some jaguar fossils in Patagonia actually belonged to Panthera atrox, the American lion, but nothing like that had been suggested in Saint-Yves's time, and anyway it's still not Brazil.) The Eurasian cave lion (P. spelaea) grew to five feet at the shoulder, so perhaps Sant-Yves once again read feet as meters (and, in this case, height as length), but I have no idea why he thought such an animal was from Brazil of all places. Smilodon did live in Brazil, and some of the first Smilodon fossils were found in that country, so perhaps Saint-Yves got two quite different extinct felids mixed up in his memory.

And now we come to the gargantuan Smilodon itself -- le félis smilodon de vingt-huit mètres. The text does indeed say twenty-eight meters, but "tall" was added by the translators -- so perhaps what Saint-Yves meant was that the animal was 28 meters long. This would make it a mere 1,250 times as big as a real Smilodon, rather than 8,000 times -- a considerable improvement, but obviously not enough of one! Since 2.8 meters is pretty close to the real length of S. populator, my best guess is that Saint-Yves carelessly omitted a decimal point when he was doing his research and then -- somehow! -- later wrote in his book that "le félis smilodon" was as long as a blue whale without setting off his own BS detector. And Seraya and Haldane faithfully translated it, guessed that the big cat was most likely 28 meters tall rather than long, and proceeded as if that were a perfectly normal thing to write, with no need for an explanatory note. I guess The Urantia Book didn't have anything to say about it.

As for the other two creatures mentioned, le diornis should be Dinornis, the giant moa of New Zealand. It was in a general sense "as big as an elephant" -- a bit taller than an elephant but only one-tenth as heavy. Ornitichnithès should be Ornithichnithes -- a name formerly applied to some tetrapod footprints dating to the Carboniferous, and so obviously not those of a bird! Current opinion is that they were made by a mammal-like reptile of some sort. (The translators have Google, too. Why couldn't they have done this work for me?)

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Really, though, who cares if a book about the mission of the Jews gets its paleontology wrong? It's not a science book, right? Well, I think we need to guard against the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. An author who can get so many facts in a single paragraph so wrong -- so insanely wrong! -- who can swallow the idea of a 28-meter tiger without batting an eye -- is likely to prove equally careless and gullible when it comes to things that can't be so easily checked.