EARLY BIRD chapters in the history of palaeontology

Poster for Camille Flammarion’s Le monde avant la création de l’homme (’The world before man’s creation’), 1856

Flammarion’s book was a work of popular science, and sought to awe its readers as much as inform them. Although the rather overweight dinosaur here borrows heavily from the reconstructions made about fifteen years earlier by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins’ for the Crystal Palace exhibition, the image of a dinosaur standing next a high building looking into its top floors would prove compelling enough to last.

A pivotal element in the portrayal of dinosaurs has always been their size – and, often, little else. The (literal) otherworldiness of these animals came to light even more when they were placed in surroundings that were familiar to us. The contrast between such huge, unwieldy and chaotic animals, and our own comfortable and controlled surroundings would increase our awe of them (and, of course, our fear).

In fact, the very first ‘real’ dinosaur movie was based on this theme. In Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) Winsor McKay shows us an animal who drinks lakes and eats trees, but is not unfriendly or agressive. That would change rapidly. Harry Hoyt’s The Lost World (1925) already features dinosaurs that seem set on making poor humans’ lives as miserable as possible. Likewise the Japanese Godzilla series had a dinosaur of sorts (enhanced with fire-breathing and nuclear abilities) wreak havoc to entire cities from the early 1950s onwards. And more recently the Jurassic Park series of films adopted (one might say: copied) the same approach. Read more…

From: Edward Newman (1843), “Note on the Pterodactyle Tribe considered as Marsupial Bats”. The Zoologist 1, p. 129. Comment: “The upper figure represents Pterodactylus crassirostris, the lower, Pter. brevirostris”.

Edward Newman (1801-1876) was interesting figure, beginning as a naturalist (particularly in entomology) early in life and later manifesting himself as a publisher of, among others, The Zoologist. Although not a specialist in pterosaurs (it needs to be said, however, that at the time no-one could rightly be called so) he published an article in that journal’s first year, 1843. In it, he took the observation of tufts of hair in pterosaurs to the logical conclusion that the animals could not possibly have been ‘naked’ reptiles. The similarities between bats and pterosaurs had already been noted by the German Samuel Thomas von Soemmering*, but the leading authority on vertebrate anatomy, Georges Cuvier, had discredited that interpretation. Interestingly, Newman sounds somewhat exasperated when he decides to counter Cuvier’s views, and the article gives us some insight into the power of authority in 19th-century science:

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From: T.C. Winkler (1874), “Le Pterodactylus kochi du Musée Teyler”. Extract from Archives du Musée Teyler, Vol. III, Fasc. 4 (Haarlem: De Erven Loosjes).

Tiberius Cornelis Winkler (1822-1897) was one of the illustrious curators of geology and minerology at the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands (his successor was Eugène dubois, of Pithecanthropus repute). He became mainly identified with popularising Darwinism after having translated Darwin’s Origin into Dutch, but he spent most of his work cataloguing the Teyler collections. This illustration is from one of these descriptions.

In 1937, the specimen of the giant sauropod Brachiosaurus brancai that Werner Janensch et al. dug up in the Tendaguru beds of Tanzania (or »Tanganyika« as contemporaries would have dubbed it) was mounted in the central hall, the Lichthof, of the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde.

Before that time, the hall was mainly taken up with whales. None of these are on display today, but before the advent of Brachiosaurus and his ilk the Museum für Naturkunde was more occupied with living nature than with extinct animals. In this photograph, the Lichthof is still dominated by the massive remains of four whales in the middle: two grey whales, one sperm whale and a reconstructed tail end. To the left is Dicraeosaurus hansemanni, like Brachiosaurus harvested from Tendaguru; to the right is Diplodocus carnegii, donated to the museum by Andrew Carnegie in 1908 and at the time its only dinosaur.

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From a visit to the Paris Museum of Palaeontology, a few weeks back. In this ‘museum of a museum’, Diplodocus is featured in all its turn-of-the-(previous)-century glory. In fact this is the only one (as far as I know, but I haven’t seen the Bologna copy yet) still in its original position, as William Holland and Arthur Coggeshall put it up. Read more…

Of course, many of us will recognise the frontispiece to Thomas Hawkins’ weirdish Book of the Great Sea-Dragons, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri. Gedolim Taninim, of Moses. Extinct Monsters of the Ancient Earth from 1840. But the wonderful plates of fossils at the back of the volume generally get far less attention than the archetypically hellish frame above.

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This is a repost from pastworlds.posterous.com

Source: Gerhard Heilmann 1928, »A restoration of Iguanodon bernissartensis«, Palaeobiologica Dollo-Festschrift (Vienna & Leipzig: Emil Haim & Co.), pp. 101-102, 1 plate.

Heilmann, who became famous for his book The Origin of Birds, published a little-known, short piece about Iguanodon a few years later in an issue of Othenio Abel’s Palaeobiologica, dedicated to the Belgian palaeontologist Louis Dollo. In a lot of ways, this Iguanodon is much more ‘old-fashioned’ than his dynamic restorations in The Origin of Birds.

First, it stands much more vertically. Although its tail doesn’t rest on the ground in the way that, for example, Charles Knight reconstructed his bipedal dinosaurs, it is still an altogether more stodgy-looking affair. This is further enhanced by the fact that the animal now looks quite iguana- (and therefore reptile-) like. Interestingly, an accompanying line drawing the animal’s head decreases that effect, but it’s still not quite as ‘modern’-looking as the 1926 reconstruction. In case you were wondering, Heilmann himself explains that:

»this reconstruction [...] does not in the main features differ much from my former one (The Origin of Birds, Fig. 111), but the two running animals did not resemble reptiles at all«.

In general, I think Heilmann’s pen drawings are much more effective than his colour work (the famous Archaeopteryx reconstruction being an exception, perhaps). It is interesting to see him reverting to a more conservative approach here, although I’m unsure where the significance of that may lie.

However, as I’ve written before, it is clear that from the first drawings in 1912, Heilmann’s reconstructions become progressively more and more restrained. That is particularly the case with regard to the stance he lets his animals adopt: from the fighting Archaeopteryxes of 1914 we end with the courting couple we know so well from the 1926 edition.

Heilmann’s entire essay is here. Go here for more examples of his artwork.

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Source M. Wildfahrt 1949, Die Lebensweise der Dinosaurier (Stuttgart). Illustration taken from P. Bultnynck 1987, Bernissart en de Iguanodons (Brussels: Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences), p. 74

The predominant image of dinosaurs as water-going creatures did not limit itself to sauropods; hadrosaurs were also considered to be pond dwellers for a long time. However, the idea of Iguanodon as an aquatic animal was not quite so common. This German work from the late 1949s is testimony to the fact that German palaeontology had some pretty idiosyncratic ideas of its own.

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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.

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Riou, View of earth during the Lias Era (’Gezigt van de aarde, gedurende het Lias-tijdperk’; metal engraving).

From a Dutch reworking by E.M. Beima of Louis Figuier’s La terre avant le Déluge (1863) & Oscar Fraas’ Vor der Sindfluth: Eine Geschichte der Urwelt (1866).