At Kimmswick, originally known as Sulphur Springs, Dr. Albert C. Koch first investigated the site in May 1839 and amassed a large collection of bones there. Using those remains together with other bones from southwestern Missouri, he inaccurately reconstructed a mastodon he called Missourium kochii or Missouri Leviathan, then toured the United States and parts of Europe with the skeleton before it was sold to the British Museum of Natural History and correctly remounted as a mastodon. In 1897, amateur paleontologist C.W. Beehler began publicizing the Kimmswick site, lectured and wrote about it through 1899, gained support from a group of St. Louis citizens, and began excavating there in March 1900. A 60-foot by 40-foot museum was built to store fossil specimens and drew tourists and professionals from across the United States, and Beehler appears to have excavated until about 1904 or 1905, though what happened to the materials is unknown. In the early 1940s, archaeologist Robert McCormick Adams of the St. Louis Museum of Science excavated at Kimmswick with support from the Works Progress Administration, kept the first good notes of where work was done on the site, and recovered many bones, though the only projectile point he found came from Early Archaic levels above the Clovis levels. After the Department of Natural Resources acquired the site, it contracted with the Illinois State Museum to determine how much had been excavated and how much remained. Those excavations in 1979, 1980, and 1984 produced the first undisputed evidence in North America of the association of man and mastodon, including a large Clovis spear point recovered in 1979 and other artifacts found the following year that were associated with late Pleistocene animals.