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'.

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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.

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.)

The remains of a model of a whale in the inner courtyard of the bombed-out Natural History Museum in Berlin, 1945 (Museum für Naturkunde, Historische Bild- und Schriftsammlungen). The museum, which is home to some of the greatest palaeontological specimens in the world (e.g., the most famous Archaeopteryx lithographica specimen and the huge Brachiosaurus brancai from Tendaguru, Tanzania) is still in a state of reconstruction. Recently, it central hall ('Lichthof') was reopened after an extensive overhaul. Repost from my now-defunct Past Worlds blog

Some time ago I wrote about the Paris copy of Diplodocus carnegii. In this video you see the entire animal taken from tail end to nose tip, and get some idea of its size and shape. 26,5 meters of dinosaur from Valium Chat on Vimeo.

Unknown artist, Archaeopteryx. The oldest fossil bird ('De Archeopteryx. (de oudste fossiele vogel)'; metal engraving). From the Dutch translation of Camille Flammarion's La terre avant la création de l'homme (The Earth before Man's Creation), 2nd Ed., 1880s (original 1886; exact age unknown), p. 429. Like most of the illustrations in Flammarion's books, this one is unsigned. And like most, it uses oodles of artistic license rather than attempting to bring a 'serious' reconstruction. I will post more from this remarkable work at a later date.

In December of 1941, the Swiss ornithologist Manfred Reichel published an essay on the first bird Archaeopteryx in the journal Nos Oiseaux ('Our Birds'). The article itself is descriptive and largely (but not completely!) a re-iteration of the argument already made in Heilmann's The Origin of Birds (1926). What really makes it something special are the exquisite pen drawings Reichel used to adorn his essay. They're Heilmann-esque, but I daresay more refined. Moreover, they're quite mundane in the posture of their subject; a departure from the 'confrontational' model used in late-19th-century reconstructions. I've put the entire essay and some high-resolution images online at a dedicated Reichel page. Enjoy!

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