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.
This is a repost from pastworlds.posterous.com
In December of 1941, the Swiss ornithologist Manfred Reichel published an essay on the first bird Archaeopteryx in the journal Nos Oiseaux (’Our Birds’). The article itself is descriptive and largely (but not completely!) a re-iteration of the argument already made in Heilmann’s The Origin of Birds (1926).
What really makes it something special are the exquisite pen drawings Reichel used to adorn his essay. They’re Heilmann-esque, but I daresay more refined. Moreover, they’re quite mundane in the posture of their subject; a departure from the ‘confrontational’ model used in late-19th-century reconstructions.
I’ve put the entire essay and some high-resolution images online at a dedicated Reichel page. Enjoy!
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.
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.
