In Philadelphia Humans Encounter their First Dinosaur
Until 1868, no one had ever seen a dinosaur skeleton. When Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences put the first one on display that year, crowds were unstoppable.
In Philadelphia Humans Encounter their First Dinosaur
Here's my column for Monday, March 12. It will also run in print on the cover of the Health and Science section:
It was the time of P.T. Barnum, when people would line up to see a whitewashed elephant or a carefully faked petrified giant. But in 1868, a display in Philadelphia proved that reality could be far stranger than fiction. That year, the Academy of Natural Sciences showed the world its first glimpse of a real dinosaur skeleton - a 15-foot tall Godzilla pulled from a pit in Haddonfield, N.J.
The creature threatened to obliterate the traditional picture of the universe. Along with Darwin’s theory and a revolution in geology, dinosaur fossils were opening the human imagination to lost worlds on our own planet, separated by vast epochs of time.
It was a quantum leap from the neat, biblical picture of a 6,000 year-old earth, created complete with all of today’s living things.
Some inevitably clung to the old order, insisting that these monsters were somehow lost in the Biblical flood, said Robert Peck, Curator of Arts and Artifacts at the Academy and co-author of A Glorious Enterprise: The Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and the Making of American Science. The book is being released just in time for the Academy’s bicentennial festivities, which kick off Mar. 24.
The dinosaur who unwittingly donated its remains to this display was called Hadrosaurus foulkii. It stood 14 feet tall and stretched 26 feet from head to tail. It didn’t leave the complete skeleton, but there were enough bones to allow an American paleontologist and a British sculptor to fill in the blanks with plaster, said Peck.
The sculptor, Benjamin Hawkins, had created models of dinosaurs for display in London. Another display in Central Park was destroyed by vandals. The paleontologist, Joseph Leidy, was a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a curator at the Academy.
Unfortunately, said Peck, the beast was missing its head. So Leidy and Hawkins, as a rough guess, decided to scale up the head of an iguana lizard.
Together, their work shaped the public’s image of dinosaurs for decades to come. Hawkins’ earlier sculptures depicted lumbering beasts that stood with all four legs firmly on the ground, said Peck. Leidy, who was trained as a physician, used his knowledge of anatomy to propose a more upright stance, one that is closer to the current image of dinosaurs as more graceful beasts.
The display was so popular that the Academy had to start charging a 10 cent admission fee, said Peck, hoping to keep the crowds under control.
The Hadrosaurus was first pulled from the ground in 1858, a year before the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Through the 19th century, less complete dinosaur fossils were already tearing holes in the paradigm of an all-species-included creation.
Leidy was among those open to the possibility of extinction. At one point, he wrote that his public reputation was suffering as a result. “I am shamefully abused of being an atheist and an infidel,” he wrote to colleague Spencer Baird of the Smithsonian.
When Darwin finally published his theory of natural selection, Leidy embraced it, and nominated Darwin for election to the Academy that year. Darwin wrote back with gratitude. “Most paleontologists entirely despise my work: consequently approbation from you has gratified me much.”
There were still vast mysteries to be solved. While Leidy could say that the creature came from the Carboniferous period, he couldn't say how long ago that was. A new geology born of the 19th century allowed time to stretch back millions of years, but the calibration of a geological time scale would have to wait until the next century.
There was much trial and error in early paleontology. “A bone was found, and it was thought to mean one thing, then a second bone was found and together the two bones indicated something entirely different,” wrote former Inquirer reporter Mark Jaffe in his book, The Guilded Dinosaur, which describes the evolution of science in this era.
When self-educated paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope put together the Academy’s second great prehistoric creature, the famously brash and brilliant 29-year-old placed the head on what was later determined to be the end of the tail.
His error was corrected by a studiously observant Yale professor named O.C. Marsh, who was something of an early myth-buster, having debunked a P.T. Barnum spectacle known as the Cardiff Giant. Marsh knew enough about anatomy to realize that the vertebrae were backwards in Cope’s original reconstruction.
But such hiccups aside, modern science was taking shape and the Academy’s Leidy was an important part of that, said Ted Daeschler, the academy’s Associate Curator and Chair of Vertebrate Zoology.
Traditionally, Academy scientists focused their energies on careful empirical observations, Daeschler said. “Leidy absolutely provided the foundation pieces for the concepts Darwin was working on that the time.”
And in turn, Darwin’s theory helped Leidy and others make sense of what they were describing, he said. “This is the classic way science is supposed to work.”
Contact Faye Flam at 215-854-4977, fflam@phillynews.com, on her blog at www.philly.com/evolution, or @fayeflam on Twitter.
The feud between O.c. Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope makes some of the cattiest exchanges on POTA comments look like a tea party. BTW, Barnum's Cardiff Giant was a phony copy of the original fake Giant. David Hannum, who was one the original buyers of the "real" Giant, said "There's a sucker born every minute."— jxxphilly- So, the "famously brash" Cope placed the head of the second dinosaur at the end of its tail? What kind of dinosaur was it, and are there any pictures of it with the head on the tail? That would be amusing.— Falls Ed
- Can you imagine Cope's humiliation? "A dinosaur walked into a bar with its head on its tail...."— jxxphilly
- Talking with my fellow volunteers at AMNH about this dinosaur recently, I discovered a surprising misconception among some of them, who thought its name was derived from the town of Haddonfield, where it was found. Of course, it wasn't: http://haddonfield.patch.com/articles/dinosaur-not-named-for-town.
The name Hadrosaurus has been variously translated as "heavy reptile" (Thomas J. Holtz, Jr., http://www.geol.umd.edu/~tholtz/dinoappendix/HoltzappendixWinter2010.pdf - scroll down to p. 44 on his genus list) or "stout reptile" (Fastovsky & Weishampel, "The Evolution & Extinction of the Dinosaurs, 2nd Ed.", p. 211 or "bulky lizard" (Darren Naish, "The Great Dinosaur Discoveries", p. 32) or "sturdy lizard" (Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hadrosaurus ). There's even a fifth translation, "thick", as given by the Amer. Her. Dict. translating the Greek root "hadros".
The species name honors William Parker Foulke, who dug up the bones. Of course, they had been discovered 20 years earlier by John Estaugh Hopkins on his own land, but he didn't realize what he had found and lost his chance at scientific immortality.— Paleo Cello - You can read more on Cope at the Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science (PACHS) blog—
When he was mad about livestock being driven down his street:
http://www.pachs.net/blogs/comments/a_day_in_the_life_of_edward_drinker_cope/
When he was less than happy about having to teach students at Haverford College:
http://www.pachs.net/blogs/comments/the_choleric_cope_an_exhibition_panel_on_edward_drinker_cope/
His residence at 21st and Pine:
http://www.pachs.net/blogs/comments/history_of_science_in_philadelphiathe_ed_cope_residence/
A letter from Ernst Haekel to E.D. Cope:
http://www.pachs.net/blogs/comments/ernst_haeckels_letter_to_ed_cope/— dhayton - "When Darwin finally published his theory of natural selection, Leidy embraced it, and nominated Darwin for election to the Academy that year."
Whose theory of natural selection? Although creationist Edward Blyth didn't use the specific term "natural selection", this English chemist/zoologist wrote his first of three major articles on natural selection in The Magazine of Natural History, 24 years before Darwin's "Origin of Species" was published.
http://creation.com/charles-darwins-illegitimate-brainchild
http://www.icr.org/article/natural-selection-creationists-idea
— dab - The name "dinosaur" means terrible lizard, which was coined in 1842 by anatomist and paleontologist Sir Richard Owen, a creationist.
Owen opposed Darwin on scientific grounds:
http://www.creationism.org/books/TaylorInMindsMen/TaylorIMMh08.htm— dab - See also:
http://creation.com/dinosaurs-and-dragons-stamping-on-the-legends
and
http://www.rae.org/pdf/dragons.pdf
— dab - This is a quote from your first link:
"On the other hand, if creation is true, and the dinosaurs were created on Day Six of Creation Week, we should expect that:
1. Dinosaur fossils would appear suddenly in the fossil record, that is, without ancestors and intermediate forms. In fact, this is what is observed.
_____________________________
Amazing! I was unaware that the fossil record stop at 250 million years ago... Makes you wonder where those pesky Archosaur fossils came from!— Aquanerd09 - Dire Dragons by Vance Nelson (Jan. 2012); 140 pages
http://www.untoldsecretsofplanetearth.com/store/— dab - Dinosaurs ran the earth for many millions of years. We should live so long!!— cdarwin
- March named a species (I think it was the second part of the binomial) "copianus", which of course means something-or-other in Latin, I forget what.— HowardJWilk
- dab: "Owen opposed Darwin on scientific grounds:"
Wrong. Owen, like every other critc both then and now, opposed Darwin on religious grounds.
— xdrta - While Owen may have been a "creationist," he was also a gifted, although much disliked scientist, who greatly advanced the cause of museums, and had scientific objections to Darwin's ideas.— jxxphilly
In pursuit of her stories, writer Faye Flam has weathered storms in Greenland, gotten frost nip at the South Pole, and floated weightless aboard NASA’s zero-g plane. She has a degree in geophysics from the California Institute of Technology and started her writing career with the Economist. She later took on the particle physics and cosmology beat at Science Magazine before coming to the Inquirer in 1995. Her previous science column, “Carnal Knowledge,” ran from 2005 to 2008. Her new column and blog, Planet of the Apes, explores the topic of evolution and runs here and in the Inquirer’s health section each Monday. Email Faye at fflam@phillynews.com.
Reach Planet of the at fflam@phillynews.com.
