Pictures of Catastrophe: Animal Deathscapes and the Early Development of Taphonomy through Photography

In 1927, German paleontologist Johannes Weigelt published dozens of photographs featuring decomposing animals that he encountered during geological fieldwork along the US Gulf Coast. Many of these livestock and wildlife species died because of extreme weather conditions, their remains marooned in coastal beaches, riverbanks, and mudflats. Weigelt’s findings led him to assert that understanding decay and burial in contemporary biological organisms was essential for tracing fossil formation, a proposition that grounds the field now known as taphonomy. This article examines animal mobility in the context of Texas’s oil and cattle industry, analyzing how Weigelt’s images of carcasses and their parts converge in the long aftermaths of ecological catastrophes of both natural and anthropogenic origin, as well as the inseparability of the exploitation and extraction of humans, nonhuman animals, and geological resources.