From: G.E. Quinet (ca. 1970), Bernissart… il y a 125.000.000 d’années (Brussels: Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences), opp. p. 71.

This Diplodocus carnegii is almost an exact mirror image of Zdeněk Burian‘s famous early 1960s reconstruction. It might be an earlier version of the same reconstruction, and I can’t be sure whether it was mirrored by Burian or this particular book’s designer (I would think the latter, to be honest). However, it is unsigned, the publication itself gives no clue as to its provenance, and I have seen it nowhere else in listings of Burian’s work. So the jury is still out.

Mr. Holland would not have let it come to this, surely.

To be honest, from the insurer’s point of view this seems to be a somewhat disturbing ad, I would think.

Diplodocus carnegiei by Zdenek Burian (oil on canvas, 1969)

In the mid-1970s, when I was five or six years old, my mother bought a remarkably expensive book about past life for me, called Leven in de oertijd (published in English as Life before Man). Text was by Zdenek Spinar, but more importantly the illustrations were by the Czech artist Zdenek Burian (1905-1981) and were my first confrontations with all those wonderful animals of the past. It has to be said that Burian’s forte was in depicting Kenozoic animals and early humans, but the dinosaur illustrations and those of other animals of earlier times are very good, too. Burian’s inspiration by Charles Knight is obvious from many pictures, and his way of working with antagonists (T-Rex opposing a single Triceratops, that sort of thing) is similar too. But in all I find Burian’s paintings, with their hushed tones, more evocative. However, this is a judgment pickled in nostalgia, of course. Show ▼

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

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.

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.