Fossil remains of an "Oliphant" in the 16th-century St Lawrence Jewry church, City of London?

Could there have been the fossil remains of a prehistoric mammoth or elephant, such as the "straight-tusked elephant" Elephas antiquus, on show at the City of London's St Lawrence Jewry church in the 16th century?

I was at the Guildhall Library recently and they had a copy of John Stow’s A Survey of London open at the St Lawrence Jewry entry. (1595, 2nd edition 1603. Photo above - out of copyright.)



The historian John Stow was born 1525, so his account of what "I myself have seen in this churche some 60+ years since" is feasible, he would have been 10 years old at the time he says he saw the fossil bones.

60 years earlier, when Stow visited as a ten-year-old, the church had “the shank bone of a man (as it is taken) and also a tooth of a very great bignesse hanged up for shew (show) in chaines of Iron upon a pillar of stone, the tooth being about the bignesse of a man’s fist is long since conveyed from thence: the thighe or shanke bone of 25 inches (62.5 cm) in length by the rule remaineth yet fastened to a post.” (Thanks to Tim Holt Wilson for help deciphering the Gothic typeface from that era.)

A marginal note adds:
“The tooth of some monstrous fish, I take it. A shank bone of 25 inches long, of a man as is said, but might be of an Oliphant." (Photo below, out of copyright.)

A "shank bone" (thigh bone or femur) of a tall human, the longest bone in the human body, could be 25 inches long, but it's rare. The leg bones of a Proboscidean (elephant, mammoth or mastodon) resemble that of a scaled-up human, so Stow's speculation that it's a bone from an "Oliphant" is reasonable. The "tooth of a very great bigness" sounds like a massive molar of an elephant or mammoth, or a fragment of such a molar.



It's a good educated guess by Stow, especially given the scarcity of published works at the time that would have described elephant skeletons. Stow's identificaton is also ahead of its time. Half a century later, a correspondent from Suffolk described a likely fossil Proboscidean skeleton as "the Body of a Mighty giant", while Cotton Mather in colonial Massachusetts - a century after Stow was writing - was shown teeth and bones from an elephant or mastodon from upstate New York and interpreted these as the remains of the Nephilim - "fallen angels" from the Old Testament.

St Lawrence Jewry church, which takes its name from the nearby neighbourhood where Jews once settled, was destroyed in the Great Fire of 1666. Before that, the church had likely had a clear-out of "superstitious" artefacts in thr Reformation, whose peak was in the 1540s. This may explain why some of the artefacts Stow had seen there as a child had been "long since conveyed from thence." The iconoclasts of the Reformation, though, had as their target anything that looked Catholic rather than anything prehistoric. The bones of a giant, "monstrous fish" or "Oliphant" don't seem to have been passed off as a saint's, so they were safe from the Reformation's iconoclasts but not from the Great Fire.

See a detailed invesigation into the "the Body of a Mighty giant" unearthed at Brockford Bridge, Suffolk in 1652, co-authored with Tim Holt Wilson, here.