Workmen mounting the first Iguanodon bernissartensis skeleton in the St. George Chapel in Brussels, 1882. Because Belgium did not really possess a tradition in mounting vertebrate specimens, Dollo’s men had to invent their own method. Although they successfully mounted a great number of specimens (who are now on display in the Brussels Museum of Natural History), their solution meant that unmounting the animals was near to impossible without physically damaging them. These days, the Brussels Iguanodons have become museum specimens in more than one way, illustrating the evolution of mounting such animals in museums in the nineteenth century.
From: G.E. Quinet (ca. 1970), Bernissart… il y a 125.000.000 d’années (Brussels: Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences), opp. p. 71.
This Diplodocus carnegii is almost an exact mirror image of Zdeněk Burian’s famous early 1960s reconstruction. It might be an earlier version of the same reconstruction, and I can’t be sure whether it was mirrored by Burian or this particular book’s designer (I would think the latter, to be honest). However, it is unsigned, the publication itself gives no clue as to its provenance, and I have seen it nowhere else in listings of Burian’s work. So the jury is still out.
G. Biese, illustration accompanying Friedrich von Huene’s 1928 description of German saurischians (F. von Huene 1928, »Lebensbild des Saurischier-Vorkommen in Trossingen«, in: Palaeobiologica I, Table XI.)
Diplodocus carnegiei by Zdenek Burian (oil on canvas, 1969)
In the mid-1970s, when I was five or six years old, my mother bought a remarkably expensive book about past life for me, called Leven in de oertijd (published in English as Life before Man). Text was by Zdenek Spinar, but more importantly the illustrations were by the Czech artist Zdenek Burian (1905-1981) and were my first confrontations with all those wonderful animals of the past. It has to be said that Burian’s forte was in depicting Kenozoic animals and early humans, but the dinosaur illustrations and those of other animals of earlier times are very good, too. Burian’s inspiration by Charles Knight is obvious from many pictures, and his way of working with antagonists (T-Rex opposing a single Triceratops, that sort of thing) is similar too. But in all I find Burian’s paintings, with their hushed tones, more evocative. However, this is a judgment pickled in nostalgia, of course.
Burian himself was copied as well, of course. This Diplodocus from a “J. Smit” (the poster of which you may purchase at Allposters.com) seems to owe a great deal to the one above (I can’t be certain, since I haven’t been able to date this image). However, the graceful ways of Burian’s beast have disintegrated into a much ‘pudgier’ ensemble, which appears to have gorged itself. Moreover, its stance seems to represent some sort of compromise between the elephantine Diplodocus of Holland, and the reptile-like crawl advanced early in the 20th century by Hay and Tornier.
Digger of fossils, listener to music by obscure composers, ravisher of Type, cycler of eight daily kilometers to the Huygens Institute, and eight back, reader of sombre Scandinavian thrillers, Frisian fundamentalist with tongue firmly in cheek, watcher of British comedy, critical user of all that is Apple and collector of their older machines, eater of foods, drinker of beers (particularly German wheat beer), lamenting departer of Berlin, satisfied inhabiter of a seaside (or nearly so) apartment in The Hague, Netherlands.
