It is really a book that anyone interested in bird origins or the history of palaeontology ought to read; I scanned and OCR’ed it so that everyone can. Click here to download the entire book in searchable PDF format. Be aware that as PDFs go, it’s a whopper at just over 50 MB.

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.But what makes all of these portrayals so compelling is still, as with Flammarion, the confrontation between the ‘other’ and our own, daily experience. Godzilla’s tail destroys our comfortable surroundings, in Jurassic Park Tyrannosaurus rex chases a vehicle no modern animal would be able to chase. It’s the juxtaposition of scale and unpredictability of the animals, and our estrangement with what we hold as obvious.

As we have seen, the habit of emphasising a dinosaur’s size by having it peep into a high-rise building therefore dates back to at least 1856. However, the picture from 1898 below (like Gertie would later be, a product of the Hearst press) probably portrays its most famous application, also because it sparked off Andrew Carnegie’s interest in (and subsequent sponsoring of) the excavation of dinosaurs in the American West.

The New York Journal and Advertiser, front page, 11 December 1898.

When it ate, it filled a stomach large enough to hold three elephants

A ‘Brontosaurus giganteus’ is seen peeping into the 11th floor (sorry, that’s the 10th floor) of the New York Life building. The article is accompanied by typically hysterical Hearstianisms and a level of factual inaccuracy that would become typical for press attempts to cover scientific subjects. The skull, for instance, although portrayed as the plant-eating Brontosaurus, is in fact Ceratosaurus nasicornis, a very nasty-looking thing indeed that doubtless was deemed more impressive than the rather undaunting Brontosaurus skull (which in fact was Camarasaurus, but let’s not confuse the issue even further). For good measure, click here in order to see the entire page*.

The way in which the cover artist for Flammarion’s book was copied (this is not the only instance) by Hearst’s artist is something we see happening over and over with reconstructions of extinct life. Below is another example, this time (from left to right) an amalgam of a scale comparison from The Century (USA; 1904), a cover which Charles Knight created for Scientific American in 1907**, and what The Mentor World Traveller (UK) made of both in 1922. Knight’s adaptation of the stance of Diplodocus suggested in the Century reconstruction seems quite clear, and with the Mentor re-inserting the human figure Knight took out, the reconstruction seems to have come full circle again.***

*Source: Tom Rea (2001), Bone Wars. The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie’s Dinosaur (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press), page 31.

** Much of this issue was devoted to the donation by the American Museum of Natural History to the Frankfurt Senckenberg museum of a partial skeleton of Diplodocus longus.

*** I haven’t been able to ascertain whether Knight originally painted this as a size comparison as well, and if the Mentor used an original painting or added the human figure themselves (which, considering the difference in style, seems obvious). I’d be grateful for further information on this point.

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:

“I have often spoken of these same pterodactyles with men of good repute as comparative anatomists, but I never could get them beyond the words, – “Cuvier has said it; Buckland has declared it; ” – and thus the question of the highest interest depends not on fact, but on the infallibility of Cuvier and Buckland. Now I believe it within the range of possibility that Cuvier and Buckland should be in error. I confess that this is highly improbable, but I contend that it is possible. Regard them as we may, there is still that evidence of humanity about them that induces us to suppose them capable of error.”

(Newman’s italics). The entire article, kindly scanned by Google Books** can be read by clicking on this link (PDF alert).

* It is quite easy to be derogatory about these early attempts at identifying pterosaurs, but one should remember that at this time there was virtually no point of reference for their study. Some scholars (e.g. David Unwin 2006, The Pterosaurs from Deep Time (New York: Pi Books)) withouth much a sense of historicity all too easily put Soemmering (and others!) into the ‘wrong’ category without apparently realising that there wasn’t a ‘right’. Also, it would be interesting to see in, ow, ten year’s time, where on the ‘wrong/right’ balance they will stand.
** I have taken the four relevant pages out of the 410-page first volume.

From: T.C. Winkler (1874), “Le Pterodactylus kochi du Musée Teyler”.

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.

In 1937 all that would change, and the hall took on the shape that is essentially unaltered until today, dominated by Brachiosaurus, the largest mounted specimen of a dinosaur in the world (as a proud plaque at its foot will tell you). These pictures show the work in progress, and the eventual result. That image did not really change until late 2008, when a new display of the three large dinosaurs in the Lichthof was opened. However, it remains centered around Brachiosaurus.

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. The animal is a copy of the Diplodocus in Pittsburgh, donated by Andrew Carnegie to the French people and unveiled in 1908 amidst much aplomb. The original wooden blocks used to separate the caudal vertebrae are still in place, and even the original platform is intact. I wouldn’t be surprised it the beast hasn’t been moved for over a century.

The head is mounted rather strangely compared to modern reconstructions; because of the position of the atlas (first vertebra) and the head, it was impossible to mount it straight on the neck. After some consideration, Holland thought this position ‘more elegant’ compared to the rather more straightforward position on the London copy.

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.

[View with PicLens]

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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