Dinosaurs, with Special Reference to the American Museum CollectionsMatthew, William Diller
Science
Dinosaurs, with Special Reference to the American Museum Collections
Matthew, William Diller
Dinosaurs
"When the Cope Collection was unpacked at the American Museum, this
lot of boxes, not thought likely to be of much interest, was left
until the last, and not taken in hand until 1902 or 1903. But when
this specimen was laid out, it appeared that a treasure had come to
light. Although collected by the crude methods of early days, it
consisted of the greater part of the skeleton of a single individual,
with the bones in wonderfully fine preservation, considering that they
had been buried for say eight million years. They were dense black,
hard and uncrushed, even better preserved and somewhat more complete
than the two fine skeletons of Allosaurus from Bone-Cabin Quarry, the
greatest treasures that this famous quarry had supplied. The great
carnivorous dinosaurs are much rarer than the herbivorous kinds, and
these three skeletons are the most complete that have ever been found.
In all the years of energetic exploration that the late Professor
Marsh devoted to searching for dinosaurs in the Jurassic and
Cretaceous formations of the West, he did not obtain any skeletons of
carnivorous kinds anywhere near as complete as these, and their
anatomy was in many respects unknown or conjectural. By comparison of
the three Allosaurus skeletons with one another and with other
specimens of carnivorous dinosaurs of smaller size in this and other
museums, particularly in the National Museum and the Kansas University
Museum, we have been able to reconstruct the missing parts of the Cope
specimen with very little possibility of serious error."
_Evidence for Combining and Posing this Mount._ "An incomplete
specimen of Brontosaurus, found by Doctor Wortman and Professor W.C.
Knight of the American Museum Expedition of 1897, had furnished
interesting data as to the food and habits of Allosaurus, which were
confirmed by several other fragmentary specimens obtained later in the
Bone-Cabin Quarry. In this Brontosaurus skeleton several of the bones,
especially the spines of the tail vertebrae, when found in the rock,
looked as if they had been scored and bitten off, as though by some
carnivorous animal which had either attacked the Brontosaurus when
alive, or had feasted upon the carcass. When the Allosaurus jaw was
compared with these score marks, it was found to fit them exactly, the
spacing of the scratches being the same as the spacing of the teeth.
Moreover, on taking out the Brontosaurus vertebrae from the quarry, a
number of broken off teeth of Allosaurus were found lying beside them.
As no other remains of Allosaurus or any other animal were
intermingled with the Brontosaurus skeleton, the most obvious
explanation was that these teeth were broken off by an Allosaurus
while devouring the Brontosaurus carcass. Many of the bones of other
herbivorous dinosaurs found in the Bone-Cabin Quarry were similarly
scored and bitten off, and the teeth of Allosaurus were also found
close to them.
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