EARLY BIRD chapters in the history of palaeontology

«Fighting Dryptosaurs. Though much smaller in size, these creatures doubtless closely resembled Tyrannosaurus rex in appearance and habits» Frontispiece, Scientific American, February 3, 1906.

This picture accompanied an article on «carnivorous dinosaurs of the age of reptiles» inside, and was originally painted by Charles Knight (I will post much more on this image in a few days). The reason was the recent discovery of the über-carnivore Tyrannosaurus rex in Montana, one year before, but illustrations or photographs of the new find obviously hadn’t reached the world yet, so the magazine had to make to with a re-cycled painting.

This is a re-post from my Past Worlds Blog. Soon more about Knight’s Dryptosaurus.

Some time ago I wrote about the Paris copy of Diplodocus carnegii. In this video you see the entire animal taken from tail end to nose tip, and get some idea of its size and shape.

26,5 meters of dinosaur from Valium Chat on Vimeo.

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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Unknown artist, Archaeopteryx. The oldest fossil bird (’De Archeopteryx. (de oudste fossiele vogel)’; metal engraving).

From the Dutch translation of Camille Flammarion’s La terre avant la création de l’homme (The Earth before Man’s Creation), 2nd Ed., 1880s (original 1886; exact age unknown), p. 429.

Like most of the illustrations in Flammarion’s books, this one is unsigned. And like most, it uses oodles of artistic license rather than attempting to bring a ’serious’ reconstruction. I will post more from this remarkable work at a later date.

As I posted before, I recently stumbled upon a request from the German illustrated weekly Die Woche for photographs of the Diplodocus cast recently donated to the Berlin Natural History Museum. Unfortunately, the magazine didn’t carry any pictures of the animal or its unveiling, or at least I haven’t been able to find any.

However, a few weeks later an article appeared – in German – written by William Holland, treating not so much the Diplodocus as the Carnegie Museum’s palaeontological collections in general. 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. This photograph shows a party of workers beside a number of bones packed in plaster encasements. These and other photographs and drawings found their way into numerous German publications throughout the 20th century, both attributed and not. I’ve uploaded the entire article, and you can get it (in PDF format; 7.2 MB) here. It’s in German and typeset in Fraktur, so you might have to adapt a little. But it is an interesting read.

Reference: William Holland, »Die paläontologischen Forschungen des Carnegieinstituts« Die Woche No. 22, 30 May 1908, pp. 951-955.