The remains of a model of a whale in the inner courtyard of the bombed-out Natural History Museum in Berlin, 1945 (Museum für Naturkunde, Historische Bild- und Schriftsammlungen).
The museum, which is home to some of the greatest palaeontological specimens in the world (e.g., the most famous Archaeopteryx lithographica specimen and the huge Brachiosaurus brancai from Tendaguru, Tanzania) is still in a state of reconstruction. Recently, it central hall (’Lichthof’) was reopened after an extensive overhaul.
Repost from my now-defunct Past Worlds blog
A model of Iguanodon bernissartensis by Joseph Pallenberg, around 1930. Currently on display in the Berlin Museum of Natural History.
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:
Read more…
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.
