Triceratops skull in Die Woche, 1908
Recently, my research has focused on the reception of Andrew Carnegie’s Diplodocuses in Europe and Argentina. When researching William Holland’s correspondence I stumbled across a request from the German illustrated weekly Die Woche for photographs of the animal. That seems not to have materialised, but a few weeks later an article appeared written by William Holland, treating not so much the Diplodocus as the Carnegie Museum’s palaeontological collections in general. This photograph of a Triceratops’ skull compared to a (small) human is one of the things I’ll be posting over the next weeks. The article is very Scientific American-ish, with an emphasis on the size of the animals but also the rough life of the men who dug up these remains. These and other photographs and drawings found their way into numerous German publications throughout the 20th century, both attributed and not.
Read this excerpt (PDF) from Tom Rea’s excellent Bone Wars. The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie’s Dinosaur (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Press 2004) for more information about the Carnegie Diplodocus story. I warmly recommend the entire book, most of which is dedicated to the discovery and mounting of the animal.
Reference: William Holland, »Die paläontologischen Forschungen des Carnegieinstituts« Die Woche No. 22, 30 May 1908, pp. 951-955.
