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.

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.

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.)

A model of Iguanodon bernissartensis by Joseph Pallenberg, around 1930. Currently on display in the Berlin Museum of Natural History.

Poster for Camille Flammarion's Le monde avant la création de l'homme ('The world before man's creation'), 1856 Flammarion's book was a work of popular science, and sought to awe its readers as much as inform them. Although the rather overweight dinosaur here borrows heavily from the reconstructions made about fifteen years earlier by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins' for the Crystal Palace exhibition, the image of a dinosaur standing next a high building looking into its top floors would prove compelling enough to last. A pivotal element in the portrayal of dinosaurs has always been their size - and, often, little else. The (literal) otherworldiness of these animals came to light even more when they were placed in surroundings that were familiar to us. The contrast between such huge, unwieldy and chaotic animals, and our own comfortable and controlled surroundings would increase our awe of them (and, of course, our fear). In fact, the very first 'real' dinosaur movie was based on this theme. In Gertie the Dinosaur (1914) Winsor McKay shows us an animal who drinks lakes and eats trees, but is not unfriendly or agressive. That would change rapidly. Harry Hoyt's The Lost World (1925) already features dinosaurs that seem set on making poor humans' lives as miserable as possible. Likewise the Japanese Godzilla series had a dinosaur of sorts (enhanced with fire-breathing and nuclear abilities) wreak havoc to entire cities from the early 1950s onwards. And more recently the Jurassic Park series of films adopted (one might say: copied) the same approach.

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«Fighting Dryptosaurs. Though much smaller in size, these creatures doubtless closely resembled Tyrannosaurus rex in appearance and habits» Frontispiece, Scientific American, February 3, 1906. This picture accompanied an article on «carnivorous dinosaurs of the age of reptiles» inside, and was originally painted by Charles Knight (I will post much more on this image in a few days). The reason was the recent discovery of the über-carnivore Tyrannosaurus rex in Montana, one year before, but illustrations or photographs of the new find obviously hadn't reached the world yet, so the magazine had to make to with a re-cycled painting. This is a re-post from my Past Worlds Blog. Soon more about Knight's Dryptosaurus.

In 1937, the specimen of the giant sauropod Brachiosaurus brancai that Werner Janensch et al. dug up in the Tendaguru beds of Tanzania (or »Tanganyika« as contemporaries would have dubbed it) was mounted in the central hall, the Lichthof, of the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde. Before that time, the hall was mainly taken up with whales. None of these are on display today, but before the advent of Brachiosaurus and his ilk the Museum für Naturkunde was more occupied with living nature than with extinct animals. In this photograph, the Lichthof is still dominated by the massive remains of four whales in the middle: two grey whales, one sperm whale and a reconstructed tail end. To the left is Dicraeosaurus hansemanni, like Brachiosaurus harvested from Tendaguru; to the right is Diplodocus carnegii, donated to the museum by Andrew Carnegie in 1908 and at the time its only dinosaur.

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As I posted before, I recently stumbled upon a request from the German illustrated weekly Die Woche for photographs of the Diplodocus cast recently donated to the Berlin Natural History Museum. Unfortunately, the magazine didn't carry any pictures of the animal or its unveiling, or at least I haven't been able to find any. However, a few weeks later an article appeared - in German - written by William Holland, treating not so much the Diplodocus as the Carnegie Museum’s palaeontological collections in general. The article is very Scientific American-ish, with an emphasis on the size of the animals but also the rough life of the men who dug up these remains. This photograph shows a party of workers beside a number of bones packed in plaster encasements. These and other photographs and drawings found their way into numerous German publications throughout the 20th century, both attributed and not. I've uploaded the entire article, and you can get it (in PDF format; 7.2 MB) here. It's in German and typeset in Fraktur, so you might have to adapt a little. But it is an interesting read. Reference: William Holland, »Die paläontologischen Forschungen des Carnegieinstituts« Die Woche No. 22, 30 May 1908, pp. 951-955.

From a visit to the Paris Museum of Palaeontology, a few weeks back. In this 'museum of a museum', Diplodocus is featured in all its turn-of-the-(previous)-century glory. In fact this is the only one (as far as I know, but I haven't seen the Bologna copy yet) still in its original position, as William Holland and Arthur Coggeshall put it up.

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Source: Gerhard Heilmann 1928, »A restoration of Iguanodon bernissartensis«, Palaeobiologica Dollo-Festschrift (Vienna & Leipzig: Emil Haim & Co.), pp. 101-102, 1 plate. Heilmann, who became famous for his book The Origin of Birds, published a little-known, short piece about Iguanodon a few years later in an issue of Othenio Abel's Palaeobiologica, dedicated to the Belgian palaeontologist Louis Dollo. In a lot of ways, this Iguanodon is much more 'old-fashioned' than his dynamic restorations in The Origin of Birds. First, it stands much more vertically. Although its tail doesn't rest on the ground in the way that, for example, Charles Knight reconstructed his bipedal dinosaurs, it is still an altogether more stodgy-looking affair. This is further enhanced by the fact that the animal now looks quite iguana- (and therefore reptile-) like. Interestingly, an accompanying line drawing the animal's head decreases that effect, but it's still not quite as 'modern'-looking as the 1926 reconstruction. In case you were wondering, Heilmann himself explains that:

»this reconstruction [...] does not in the main features differ much from my former one (The Origin of Birds, Fig. 111), but the two running animals did not resemble reptiles at all«.

In general, I think Heilmann's pen drawings are much more effective than his colour work (the famous Archaeopteryx reconstruction being an exception, perhaps). It is interesting to see him reverting to a more conservative approach here, although I'm unsure where the significance of that may lie. However, as I've written before, it is clear that from the first drawings in 1912, Heilmann's reconstructions become progressively more and more restrained. That is particularly the case with regard to the stance he lets his animals adopt: from the fighting Archaeopteryxes of 1914 we end with the courting couple we know so well from the 1926 edition. Heilmann's entire essay is here: