EARLY BIRD chapters in the history of palaeontology

This post on the wonderfully nichey Sauropod Vertebra of the Week Blog has an interesting story about size in Brachiosaurs.

What it underlines is the influence the mounted skeleton of Brachiosaurus brancai in the Museum für Naturkunde (also known as the Humboldt Museum) in Berlin has had on subsequent reconstructions. I visited that institution twice this year, after having stayed away from it for over a year. An lo and behold: it has transformed from a rather downtrodden affair in probably the nicest natural history museum I know at present. Most importantly, it succeeds in being understandable to just about anybody without ‘dumbing things down’ too much (which, I fear, is what the London HHM can sometimes do). Their new dinosaur hall (see picture) instantly reminded me of the ‘Parade’ inside Paris’ Musée d’Histoire Naturelle (the new building), but it works very well, also as a gateway to the rest of the museum. Additionally, Archaeopteryx finally has received a proper place of honour.

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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).

…being a scientist at the beginning of the 20th century. The beard, the glasses, the baldness… and note a similarity in clothing style that appears to transcend the fashion of the age.

Although hard to believe, these three were all Dutch scientists working more or less contemporaneously in the Netherlands around 1900. These are: physicist Hendrik Lorentz, historian Petrus Blok, and physicist Johannes van der Waals.

Lorentz and Van der Waals were both Nobel laureates (both in physics, 1902 and 1910 respectively), and Blok wrote possibly the most influential work in Dutch History of the early 20th century, The History of the Dutch Peoples (1892-1907). Maybe I ought to whiten my facial fuzz as well…