American Museum of Natural History, part 3: no birds, please, we're bird-hips

And so, finally, to the hall of Ornithischian dinosaurs (as a reminder, Baron et al. 2017 isn't to be mentioned). In spite of the tendency of theropods and sauropods to hog the limelight, the AMNH's Other Dinosaur Hall almost manages to outshine the lizard-hipped-themed gallery - almost. There's no beating Rexy's charisma, but his eternal adversary certainly comes close.

American Museum of Natural History, part 2: birds, near-birds, and wide loads

Since the AMNH has so much more to offer than Sexy Rexy and the Indeterminate Apatosaurine Formerly Known as Brontosaurus, let's once again take a walk down its expansive corridors. Or at least, the dinosaur galleries. Although I've already looked at the Saurischian gallery's biggest stars, there's a lot more going on in there besides...notably, an unabashed examination of how Birds Are Dinosaurs. Because they are, you know.

American Museum of Natural History, part 1: big dead icons

For someone from a tiny island in the Old World, the United States can't half seem like an intimidating place. There's the sheer vastness of it, of course; that's obvious. There are the angry, impatient reactions you get from absolutely everyone at the airport when you arrive. And then there's the fact that you can't ever know what you'll really pay for something, because 'sales tax' (a la VAT) is never included on any price tags. Oh, and when you go to buy a bottle of Diet Coke, you'll find that it reads "20 oz", whatever that means. But all of it's worth it - even the horrific indigestion when you try to stomach their gigantic food portions - to visit the American Museum of Natural History in New York.* Blimey, it's a very good museum.

Vintage Dinosaur Art: Ivan Chermayeff

This will be a quick one today, featuring a poster rather than a book. In 1982, legendary graphic designer Ivan Chermayeff designed a poster for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, advertising free admission on Friday and Saturday nights.

 Poster design by Ivan Chermayeff; image courtesy the AIGA design archives.

You know you're a design bigwig if you're signing your work. A delightful bit of modernist design, playing on the upright forms of theropods that stalked museum halls before the dinosaur renaissance. Chermayeff likely got the gig thanks to the Mobil connection, as Mobil was one of the Chermayeff & Geismar design studio's big clients, and most enduring logo designs.

I do have a bunch of books to scan, and I know Marc always has something in the works, so I'm sure we'll be back on our usual Vintage Dinosaur Art schedule soon. This post also gives me the idea to look for more dinosaurs used in poster design, so I'll start rooting around and see what I can find.

Thursday: Live chat about Late Cretaceous dinosaur diversity

The American Museum of Natural History in New York will be hosting a live chat with paleontologists Mark Norell and Steve Brusatte this Thursday, May 10 at 1pm Eastern Standard Time. The topic will be recent research testing the idea of whether the dinosaurs were experiencing a long-term decline before the mass-extinction event that ended the Mesozoic era. From AMNH:

The team's research shows that hadrosaurs and ceratopsids, two groups of large-bodied, bulk-feeding herbivores, animals that did not feed selectively, may have experienced a decline in biodiversity in the 12 million years before the dinosaurs ultimately went extinct. In contrast, small herbivores, carnivorous dinosaurs, and the enormous sauropods remained relatively stable or even slightly increased in biodiversity.

As Brian Switek recently wrote at Dinosaur Tracking, this is a very complicated matter, and the oversimplification that casts a shadow over much popular thinking needs to be jettisoned. The dinosaurs were not marching in lockstep towards oblivion, and local trends can serve to distort what was happening globally because of selection bias. It should be a fun chat, and a great chance to get young minds to think more critically about nature (hint hint, teachers).

The AMNH also produced a summary video of the research, embedded below.



Questions can be submitted by email or via the Twitter hashtag #AMNHlive, and the chat will be hosted on the museum's site. Visit the AMNH website for more information.

Untangling "Sauropod Swindle!"

The star of "World's Largest Dinosaurs." Photo by Garrett Ziegler, via Flickr.

In a post at The Awl called Sauropod Swindle! The Monstrous Lies of the World's Largest Dinosaurs, Caroline Bankoff and Jonathan Liu write about a recent visit to the current exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History, which aims to go "beyond traditional fossil shows to reveal how dinosaurs actually lived by taking visitors into the amazing anatomy" of the sauropods.

This isn't a dry summary or unthinking string of gee-whiz moments, though. It's a thoroughly disappointed deconstruction of what they see as a major failing of the museum. Museum exhibits rarely receive this level of criticism, and while I find that aspect refreshing, I couldn't help but feel that I was being battered with cleverness during most of the piece.

After an early paragraph offering the entirely reasonable criticism of the small space the exhibition is held in, this is dropped in the reader's lap.

As dino-lovers and museum curators, we tend to be supremacists—and wishful thinkers. Perhaps it’s our bipedality, perhaps it’s the bloodlust, but for too long human beings have constrained our fellow feeling to the vultures and jackals, the terrorists and hysterics, of the dino world. A boy who pretends to be a Tyrannosaur is liable to be made quarterback or goalie (despite his terminally short arms). One who play acts Velociraptor tends to be tracked into college-prep courses and have his internet use monitored. But he who wanders around peacefully as Brachiosaurus or Diplodocus is suspected of autism, or worse. And yet we people aren’t carnivores, not really. Indeed, with ever more, and ever-fatter, human beings—beings, in this country at least, made almost entirely out of corn—it will be the plant-munching sauropod, if any dino at all, that offers us deliverance. Certainly not the gym-toned hunter-killers who by all accounts threw in their lot with the birds long ago.

I quote it at length because it's absolutely absurd, serving as a perfect demonstration of how hard the authors work to shoehorn their (shared, I suppose) ideologies into the piece. I may be off the mark here. There may be a wealth of peer-reviewed studies which look at the ways that our early childhood dinosaur fantasies correlate to our later performance in life. But to me, it reads as cuteness for the sake of it, as a desperate attempt to give silly ol' dinosaurs some larger cultural significance.

The exhibit may or may not be successful; I unfortunately lack the means to visit myself. The writers see AMNH missing the mark, and offer a knot of questions that color the rest of the post and illustrate their assumptions further.

When did this biggest city’s biggest cultural bulwarks get so theropod-craven? How was the public’s inborn need, and love, for dinos so thoroughly co-opted by commerce and ideological coercion? Darkest of all, can a new generation be made to understand the awesome majesty of these creatures in the face of the seeming dereliction of duty of every independent guardian of dino propriety?

I want good, unflinching criticism of museum exhibits. Too often, the media's attention to them involved regurgitated press releases, a practice nicely dubbed "churnalism." This doesn't serve anyone's interests, except for those of the institutional ticket booth. That's an interest I care about, naturally. I have always loved museums. I plan vacations around them. I believe in their intrinsic value as caretakers of knowledge and history. Be that as it may, when they mount exhibitions, they have the duty to do it well. They cannot be exempt from reasoned criticism. Their relationship with commercial entities deserves scrutiny. The prohibitive cost of large special exhibits does, too.

What makes "Sauropod Swindle" so aggravating is that it's not a total piece of garbage. Bankoff and Liu have valid concerns about the way the exhibit has been mounted. They are worth hearing. When they try to color the exhibition as a surreptitious piece of propaganda for its sole sponsor, Bank of America, these complaints are drowned out.

Seriously, they do that.

If the brontosaur’s heart is really no different than a chicken’s when it comes down to the chambers, the valves, the pumping, then B of A is clearly just a friendly up-scaling and streamlining of the Main Street bank in taking savings and making loans, and, perhaps, maximizing value in its own proprietary operations on the side.

This was when I started getting a serious Poe's Law vibe. As commenter Werner Hedgehog wrote, "Reading it made me feel like I was on a date with a too-serious grad student." It's not a universal sentiment; some commenters enjoyed it, as did a respected Tweep, @cambrianexplode. He then wrote that he hoped to write something in a similar vein about the Walking With Dinosaurs live show, which I find entirely appropriate and look forward to reading. After all, the WWD live show is a work of spectacular fiction. It's bound to be loaded with odd socio-political baggage.

Then again, "Sauropod Swindle" may be a big, fat joke of the sort I haven't been trained to understand. Maybe it really is a good example of Poe's Law. In that case, I'll fake a chuckle and hide behind a bottle of beer on the fringe of the in-crowd.

If you've read "Sauropod Swindle," what did you think?

And for more on this exhibit, visit SV-POW!, Pseudoplocephalus, and Dinosaur Tracking.

In the shadow of Barnum Brown

Another great addition to the AMNH YouTube channel, here are Lowell Dingus and Mark Norell providing a quick introduction to legendary dinosaur hunter Barnum Brown.



Dingus and Norell collaborated on last year's biography, Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus rex. Read Brian Switek's review here.

The Stupid Lizard

If you've got a bit of spare time, the library of the Field Museum's flickr photostream is well worth a look. It features a nifty set of photos from the days before the institution moved to its current home on the Lake Michigan Waterfront. During its first couple decades, it was located on the spot where the Museum of Science Industry stands presently.

Those were the days before the well-populated dinosaur halls we're lucky enough to wander through today. One Mesozoic denizen of the Field was a reproduction of America's first complete and mounted dinosaur, Joseph Leidy's Hadrosaurus foulkii, towering over a pair of Cenozoic mammals, as if to boast, "I'm basically a Mesozoic cow, y'all!"



Besides the simple enjoyment of old photos, online galleries like this one sometimes contain unexpected glimpses into paleontology as it happened. One of the photos shared by the Field library is this sauropod leg found in 1899, identified as Morosaurus impar. Morosaurus is probably one of the most hilariously awful names ever imposed on a dinosaur, meaning "stupid lizard." This was a flash of genius from the Great Dismal Swamp himself, O.C. Marsh.



Much of the plate was painted white to mask out the leg for photographic reproduction. That reproduction was then used for a 1901 paper written by Field geology curator Elmer S. Riggs. Besides describing this forelimb, Riggs briefly touches on the taxonomic status of Morosaurus and another sauropod, Atlantosaurus. In the kind of taxonomic bloat that characterized the Bone Wars era, Marsh had assigned about a dozen specimens between the two genera to their own species (see Morosaurus and Atlantosaurus at the Dinosaur Encyclopedia). Having visited with Henry Fairfield Osborn recently - who was preparing a monograph on E.D. Cope's Camarasaurus - Riggs foresaw the demotion of both of the genera, writing,

"In his original description Cope predicted the unusually long humerus which the Museum specimen has so well demonstrated. The three specimens may thus be regarded as representatives of a single genus, which, in view of its priority, should retain the generic name Camarosaurus [sic]. The description of the type specimen promised by Dr. Osborn will doubtless throw further light upon the relationship of this interesting group."

Though he produced a few works on sauropod anatomy in the years after Riggs wrote this, it wouldn't be until 1921 that Osborne's great monograph would be published. A mere four years later, it was topped by Charles Gilmore's monograph on Camarasaurus, starring what is still considered the finest sauropod skeleton ever excavated. Gilmore's monograph also spelled curtains for the stupid lizard, synonomizing it with Camarasaurus, which took precedent. Though "chamber lizard" isn't exactly glamorous, it's quite a step up from the demeaning epithet thought up by Marsh.


The famous Carnegie Camarasaurus, star of the Gilmore monograph. Photo by Kabacchi, via flickr.

For more on the Camarasaurus monographs of the early 20th century, check out these two pages at the wonderful Linda Hall Museum Paper Dinosaurs digital exhibition.

The Worlds Largest Dinosaurs Coming to the AMNH

The American Museum of Natural History has announced a new exhibition coming in April called "The World's Largest Dinosaurs." Sauropod fans (and who isn't one, really) will be able to get their fill of what are arguably the most remarkable land vertebrates of all time.

As reported by Broadway World, the exhibit's centerpiece will be "a life-sized, detailed model of a 60-foot Mamenchisaurus-will take visitors inside these giants' bodies, shedding light on how heart rate, respiration, metabolism, and reproduction are linked to size."

Despite being one of the most iconic dynasties of dinosaur-kind, sauropods are also one of the most misunderstood by the public, who know them as long-necked veggiesauruses but probably haven't had much chance to really explore the fascinating suite of adaptations that allowed them to achieve such great proportions and thrive. Hopefully this will open more eyes to just how outrageously, incredibly cool these animals were. To sign up for email alerts about the exhibition, head here.

The AMNH Youtube channel recently featured a look inside the museum's "Big Bone Room" with paleontology collections manager Carl Mehling, included here for your convenience.



Also available is a 50 minute talk with Novacek and Norell about their research and adventures from last May, which I somehow missed the first time around, but I'll remedy it just as soon as I can.

Allosaurus, Now and Then

I completely endorse changing museum displays as knowledge changes. But it's also cool when there's a continuity between the exhibits we see now and what past generations saw. For instance, the American Museum of Natural History's Allosaurus mount, in which the Jurassic theropod preys on a fallen Apatosaurus. Compare these two photos, taken nearly a century apart.


From Volume VIII of the American Museum Journal, 1908


Photo by Ryan Somma, via flickr.

Neat, huh? Finally, here's Charles M. Knight's take on the scene, one of the iconic images in the history of paleoart. You can see a second Allosaurus in the distance, standing upright in the formerly accepted theropod posture. Thanks to the fact that his supper is on the ground, this Allosaurus has a much more modern look.


Painting by Charles M. Knight, via Wikimedia Commons

I'll close with a typically wonderful piece of vintage science writing from the American Museum Journal piece the 1908 photo comes from. The writer is W.D. Matthew.

As now exhibited in the Dinosaur Hall this group gives to the imaginative observer a most vivid picture of a characteristic scene of that bygone age millions of years ago when reptiles were the lords of creation when Nature red in tooth and claw had lost none of her primitive savagery and the era of brute force and ferocity showed little sign of the gradual amelioration which was to come to pass in future through the predominance of superior intelligence.

Doing it the old fashioned way

I'm just going to keep rolling with the recent burst of dino-history subjects. This time, we'll look at a modern attempt to get back to the way paleontology was done in the old days...

The AMNH Scow MARY JANE, 1912

Between 1910 and 1914, after his great successes in the badlands of Montana, paleontologist Barnum Brown led an AMNH team on a series of expeditions into Alberta via the Red Deer River. A Canadian team led by Charles Sternberg also took to the river, engaging in a friendly rivalry with the Americans. Their mode of transportation was a kind of flat-bottomed boat called a scow. It was a very sensible way to search for new fossils in the days before paved roads. The river which made transport so easy also eroded away outcrops of rock, exposing fossils that had been buried for 65 million years or more. One of Barnum Brown's great discoveries during these expeditions was the tyrannosaur Albertasaurus, which thrilled me on my trips to the Field Museum pre-Sue.

A senior fossil preparation technician for the Royal Tyrrell Museum named Darren Tanke plans on commemorating the centennial of the first of these scow expeditions by embarking on one of his own. Since August, his team has maintained a blog to chronicle the project's progress. As if you needed more proof of Tanke's devotion to and knowledge of paleontological history, the scow is to be named in honor of Peter C. Kaisen, a technician on those early expeditions whose work in preserving valuable new fossils was crucial to the trips' mission - though naturally he's been overshadowed by the huge figure of Brown.

The Dinosaur Hunting By Boat 2010 Facebook page goes into greater detail about the project. It looks like they intend to stay as faithful as possible to the technology of a century ago; this isn't going to be a cushy leisure cruise. As the FB page says, "Food will be preserved with ice (or canned/pickled/dried), cooking done on an antique wood burning stove, coal lanterns for light, etc. The replica scow will be a floating museum as it will be fully equipped with period antiques or modern replicas of same." The team's boat will be modeled after the Mary Jane, pictured above.

I'm just super-impressed with this undertaking. Amazing.

ALSO: In case you haven't had enough giant-crocodiles-attacking-giant-theropods action, Dave Hone has featured a nice painting by paleoartist Bob Nicholls in this post.