Drawing Out Leviathan: Dinosaurs and the Science Wars

1. Mr. Carnegie's Sauropods

1 MR. CARNEGIE’S SAUROPODS I begin with two scenarios: (1) On a spring morning in a long-vanished world, an enormous creature was dying. Driven by thirst, she trudged toward the slow, muddy waters of a great river. Her massive legs could no longer support her, and she fell into the riverbed to die. Before scavengers could tear and scatter the carcass, a violent storm washed it downstream. It came to rest on a sandbar in the middle of the meandering river. As the body decayed, the river shrouded it with sediment. Soon only the bones were left, encased in ¤ne sand and silt. As the ages passed, the sediment over the bones deepened and hardened, turning into rock. Molecule by molecule, the bones themselves were also changed into rock and buried deep in the crust of the earth.Through time of unimaginable duration the fossilized bones lay hidden. All of the dead creature’s kin also disappeared,to be replaced by other faunas, and those with yet others again and again. The earth itself changed, as vast tectonic forces crushed and squeezed the continents into new shapes.Eventually those forces thrust the bones and their tomb of rock up from the depths. Wind and rain did their slow erosive work until,after one million ¤ve hundred thousand centuries of burial, the bones were brought into the sunlight. (2) On an autumn morning in New York City in the year 1898, the richest man in America had his breakfast ruined by a newspaper story. Leaving his kipper and egg untouched, he fumed over the lead article. The paper told of the discovery of the “world’s most colossal animal”by a bone hunter working for New York’s American Museum of Natural History. The accompanying illustration showed the creature ,rearing on pillar-like legs to peer into an eleventh story window. Andrew Carnegie was galled to think that another museum, and 1 not his Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, would have the glory of housing the skeleton of the biggest animal. It was worse to contemplate the credit that would go to J. P . Morgan, a chief benefactor of the American Museum, and one of the very few men who could match Carnegie in a business deal. Incensed, Carnegie wrote a check for $10,000, quite a sum in those days, and sent it to W . J. Holland, director of the Carnegie Museum, with curt instructions to buy the skeleton of the colossal animal.Morgan’s minions may have found the damn thing, but it would stand in his museum. * * * The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh houses one of the world’s great collections of dinosaur fossils. The holotype skeleton of Tyrannosaurus rex is there, the type specimen that de¤nes the species. Stegosaurus and Allosaurus confront the visitor at the entrance to Dinosaur Hall. A beautiful, complete skeleton of a juvenile Camarasaurus is on display,still partially encased in the original matrix of rock.Two skeletons dominate the hall:the enormous sauropods Diplodocus and Apatosaurus. This chapter tells the story of the discovery and reconstruction of these two specimens, highlighting the controversy over the head of Apatosaurus. No specimen of Apatosaurus has been found with the skull in place at the end of the neck. O. C. Marsh, the discoverer of Apatosaurus, reconstructed the dinosaur with a Camarasaurus-like skull. Such a reconstruction became the received image of Apatosaurus within the paleontological community (Berman and McIntosh 1978; Norman 1985). W . J. Holland, director of the Carnegie Museum, dissented. He held that a Diplodocus-like skull found in close conjunction with the Apatosaurus specimen was in fact the correct skull. This dispute did not end quickly; the ¤nal episode (so far) was played out nearly seventy years after the discovery of the Carnegie’s Apatosaurus. Holland chose not to attach the Diplodocus-like skull to the Carnegie’s Apatosaurus. Instead, the specimen was displayed headless for nearly twenty years. In 1934, after Holland’s death, a mold of a large Camarasaurus skull was attached to the skeleton.Finally,in 1979, following extensive studies by two noted paleontologists, David Berman and John McIntosh (recognized as the world’s leading authority on sauropods), the camarasaurid skull was removed, and a mold of 2 Drawing Out Leviathan Holland’s Diplodocus-like skull was attached (Berman and McIntosh 1978). For a period of forty-¤ve years, the Carnegie Museum presented...