Amsterdam may be known for a lot of things, but dinosaurs aren't usually among them. However, take a walk along the central Plantage Middenlaan in Amsterdam's Plantage ('plantation') district and you will be confronted by two unlikely-looking creatures in the city zoo's gardens: one is instantly recognizable as Stegosaurus, the other is not quite as obviously a theropod of some description.
Andreas Weber posts this interesting question on his (and several others') new blog Collect and Connect (devoted to 19th-C natural history):
Historical Taxidermic Manuals
When I visited the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin a couple of weeks ago, I stumbled upon a small exhibition on taxidermy that is the art (or is it a science?) of preparing vertebrata for museum and other purposes. In several showcases, the makers of the exhibition explained different preparation methods. What fascinated me most was the last section where historical preparation methods were discussed. In the explaining notes the makers mentioned the following historical taxidermic manuals titles. Read further at Collect and Connect
In 1878, Edward Cope gave the name Dimetrodon to a particularly nasty-looking, apparently sail-backed Permian mammal-like reptile. In the earliest years of the 20th century, Charles Sternberg discovered something similar, and had it named Naosaurus. Subsequently, the American Museum of Natural History had a reconstruction made, and a painting by Charles Knight (below).
Ever wondered about the picture above? It is a lithographical engraving from 1866 depicting Archaeopteryx - without the head. Initially, I thought that I saw a head there, but apparently there isn't. You see, this was drawn only five years after the London Archaeopteryx was discovered - which (at least initially) lacked a skull. The drawing originally appeared in Louis Figuier's The Earth before the Deluge in 1866; this one is from a Dutch translation (thrown together with a work by Oscar Fraas) by E.M. Beima, a curator from the Dutch natural history museum at Leiden. The whole illustration looks like this:
It portrays life in the 'oolithic' or upper Jurassic; there's the standard 'dragon-from-hell' pterodactyl slushing it out in the mud on the foreground, another in the air, some ferns and enough 'primeval ooze'.
Ah, Gerhard Heilmann. One of the most enigmatic contributors to palaeontology in the 20th century, and one of the most influential - despite being a painter rather than a scientist. In honesty, I've said most of what I'm going to say about him; bestides, Christopher Ries has said much more, and did it far better. However, Heilmann's 1926 book The Origin of Birds is still a seminal work in the history of palaeontology for a number of reasons: the defining influence it had in the debate on the origin of birds, the combination of text and illustration, and its strong and consistent argument. It is really a book that anyone interested in bird origins or the history of palaeontology ought to read; I scanned and OCR'ed it so that everyone can.Click here(scroll down to the bottom of the page) to view and/or download the entire book in searchable PDF format (12 MB). For reasons of size I've compressed the whole thing still further, but if you can't do without the whole 54 MB hi-res thing, let me know.
In 1934, Frankfurt preparator Christian Strunz was commissioned with the task to re-mount the Senckenberg Museum's Diplodocus. Torn between traditional American views and a more idiosyncratic approach, Strunz devised a way which saved him from having to make a choice between the 'German' and 'American' approach – more about which later
Workmen mounting the first Iguanodon bernissartensis skeleton in the St. George Chapel in Brussels, 1882. Because Belgium did not really possess a tradition in mounting vertebrate specimens, Dollo's men had to invent their own method. Although they successfully mounted a great number of specimens (who are now on display in the Brussels Museum of Natural History), their solution meant that unmounting the animals was near to impossible without physically damaging them. These days, the Brussels Iguanodons have become museum specimens in more than one way, illustrating the evolution of mounting such animals in museums in the nineteenth century.
From: G.E. Quinet (ca. 1970), Bernissart... il y a 125.000.000 d'années (Brussels: Royal Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences), opp. p. 71.
This Diplodocus carnegii is almost an exact mirror image of Zdeněk Burian's famous early 1960s reconstruction. It might be an earlier version of the same reconstruction, and I can't be sure whether it was mirrored by Burian or this particular book's designer (I would think the latter, to be honest). However, it is unsigned, the publication itself gives no clue as to its provenance, and I have seen it nowhere else in listings of Burian's work. So the jury is still out.
A not altogether reassuring view from the new Lichthof at the Berlin Museum...
Mr. Holland would not have let it come to this, surely.
To be honest, from the insurer's point of view this seems to be a somewhat disturbing ad, I would think.
G. Biese, illustration accompanying Friedrich von Huene's 1928 description of German saurischians (F. von Huene 1928, »Lebensbild des Saurischier-Vorkommen in Trossingen«, in: Palaeobiologica I, Table XI.)
About me Digger of fossils, listener to music by obscure composers, ravisher of Type, cycler of eight daily kilometers to the Huygens Institute, and eight back, reader of sombre Scandinavian thrillers, Frisian fundamentalist with tongue firmly in cheek, watcher of British comedy, critical user of all that is Apple and collector of their older machines, eater of foods, drinker of beers (particularly German wheat beer), lamenting departer of Berlin, satisfied inhabiter of a seaside (or nearly so) apartment in The Hague, Netherlands.
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