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1039 Life after Death: Dinosaur Fossils in Human Hands Daniel J. Chure Of all the extinct denizens to have walked our plant, none have captured the imagination of scientists and the public as have dinosaurs. Their (generally ) huge size, their (sometimes) ferocious nature, and their high coefficients of weirdness have made them popular cultural icons. Dinosaurs have taken on many diverse roles, including the uniformed, gas-pumping sauropod of the Sinclair Oil Company; the polite, purple Barney, purveyor of proper manners for rug rats; and the land version of the great white shark in the Jurassic Park movies (Glut 1980, 2002; Glut and Brett-Surman 1997; Lazendorf 2000; Sarjeant 2001). Wildly painted multiple casts of both their bones and footprints have even been used as the subject of exhibits by the postmodernist artist Allan McCollum (Mitchell 1998). More than half of all known dinosaur species have been described since 1970, and every week brings more publications about new discoveries. No longer are we finding just the fossilized bones of these amazing creatures. Fossilized eggs, nests, embryos, skin impressions, feathers and feathery integuments , internal organs, footprints and trackways, and even osteocytes, capillaries, and red blood cells are all providing remarkable insight into the evolution, biology, and lifestyles of the Dinosauria. Truly, we are living in the Golden Age of Dinosaur Research and there is no end in sight to this extraordinary and exciting time. Certainly the discovery of a dinosaur fossil is an exciting event. Be it a tooth, a bone, a footprint, pieces of an eggshell, or impressions of skin, each of these specimens is a tangible link to the long-vanished world of the dinosaurs. Making such a discovery is not something limited to members of scientific expeditions. Many important paleontological discoveries have been made by nonscientists. Given the abundant and global distribution of dinosaur fossils (see Weishampel et al. 2004 for an exhaustive review) it is not unexpected that someone who is not a paleontologist might come across a new dinosaur fossil sticking out of the ground. Granted, the chances of making such a find is higher while hiking and exploring in arid regions, such as the Inter Mountain West, where vegetation is sparse and cities and roads are uncommon. But even more mundane activities can lead to a chance discovery. For example, Mr. Charlie Fickle found a partial skeleton of the great predatory dinosaur Tyrannosaurus rex while walking his dog at a housing construction site in Littleton, CO (Carpenter and Young 2002). Fossils have long captured the human imagination. There was a widespread trade in fossils as far back as the Paleolithic age in Europe (Oakley 1965). They were well known to ancient civilizations in both the Old and New From Curios to Cash Cows 44 Daniel J. Chure 1040 World, although their interpretation was radically different from ours (Buffetaut 1987; Edwards 1976; Mayor 2000, 2005). Fossils have even played a central role in a nasty incident of academic and political intrigue and subsequent judicial proceedings in the early eighteenth century of Würzburg (Jahn and Woolf 1963). And fossils have a long, if ultimately ineffective, history of use in medicine (Kennedy 1976). Most of the medical use of fossils involves invertebrates, but New Age devotees have used dinosaur bone as a “grounding medium,” as part of healing pouches and healing patches used in “earth preservation ceremonies,” and in magical wands (Anonymous 1992). However, for most of the history of the science of paleontology, fossils have been natural curiosities attracting the attention of scientists and the occasional interested amateur (Brett-Surman 1997). Private collections amassed by these individuals often became the core of the emerging museums in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The earliest scientific publication on a dinosaur bone is that of Plot (1677). This specimen, the distal end of a femur, was well illustrated by Plot and Brookes (1763) and appears to belong to a predatory dinosaur known as a megalosaur. Unfortunately, this specimen is lost. Other early dinosaur discoveries, all also now lost, are reported by Lhuyd (1699) and Platt (1758). Sarjeant (1997a, 1997b) identifies a femoral shaft in the collections of the Woodwardian Museum of Cambridge as being collected in 1728; it is the earliest discovered dinosaur fossil that is still in existence. During the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, dinosaur fossils slowly continued to be gathered, although their true nature went unrecognized. However, as vertebrate paleontology expanded in the nineteenth century, the significance of dinosaurs...

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