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: Edward Newman (1843), "Note on the Pterodactyle Tribe considered as Marsupial Bats". The Zoologist 1, p. 129. Comment: "The upper figure represents Pterodactylus crassirostris, the lower, Pter. brevirostris". Edward Newman (1801-1876) was interesting figure, beginning as a naturalist (particularly in entomology) early in life and later manifesting himself as a publisher of, among others, The Zoologist. Although not a specialist in pterosaurs (it needs to be said, however, that at the time no-one could rightly be called so) he published an article in that journal's first year, 1843. In it, he took the observation of tufts of hair in pterosaurs to the logical conclusion that the animals could not possibly have been 'naked' reptiles. The similarities between bats and pterosaurs had already been noted by the German Samuel Thomas von Soemmering*, but the leading authority on vertebrate anatomy, Georges Cuvier, had discredited that interpretation. Interestingly, Newman sounds somewhat exasperated when he decides to counter Cuvier's views, and the article gives us some insight into the power of authority in 19th-century science:

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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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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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Of course, many of us will recognise the frontispiece to Thomas Hawkins' weirdish Book of the Great Sea-Dragons, Ichthyosauri and Plesiosauri. Gedolim Taninim, of Moses. Extinct Monsters of the Ancient Earth from 1840. But the wonderful plates of fossils at the back of the volume generally get far less attention than the archetypically hellish frame above. [nggallery id=5] This is a repost from pastworlds.posterous.com

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:

This post on the wonderfully nichey Sauropod Vertebra of the Week Blog has an interesting story about size in Brachiosaurs. What it underlines is the influence the mounted skeleton of Brachiosaurus brancai in the Museum für Naturkunde (also known as the Humboldt Museum) in Berlin has had on subsequent reconstructions. I visited that institution twice this year, after having stayed away from it for over a year. An lo and behold: it has transformed from a rather downtrodden affair in probably the nicest natural history museum I know at present. Most importantly, it succeeds in being understandable to just about anybody without 'dumbing things down' too much (which, I fear, is what the London HHM can sometimes do). Their new dinosaur hall (see picture) instantly reminded me of the 'Parade' inside Paris' Musée d'Histoire Naturelle (the new building), but it works very well, also as a gateway to the rest of the museum. Additionally, Archaeopteryx finally has received a proper place of honour.

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Recently, my research has focused on the reception of Andrew Carnegie's Diplodocuses in Europe and Argentina. When researching William Holland's correspondence I stumbled across a request from the German illustrated weekly Die Woche for photographs of the animal. That seems not to have materialised, but a few weeks later an article appeared written by William Holland, treating not so much the Diplodocus as the Carnegie Museum's palaeontological collections in general. This photograph of a Triceratops' skull compared to a (small) human is one of the things I'll be posting over the next weeks. 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. These and other photographs and drawings found their way into numerous German publications throughout the 20th century, both attributed and not. Read this excerpt (PDF) from Tom Rea's excellent Bone Wars. The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's Dinosaur (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh Press 2004) for more information about the Carnegie Diplodocus story. I warmly recommend the entire book, most of which is dedicated to the discovery and mounting of the animal. Reference: William Holland, »Die paläontologischen Forschungen des Carnegieinstituts« Die Woche No. 22, 30 May 1908, pp. 951-955.

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Riou, View of earth during the Lias Era ('Gezigt van de aarde, gedurende het Lias-tijdperk'; metal engraving). From a Dutch reworking by E.M. Beima of Louis Figuier's La terre avant le Déluge (1863) & Oscar Fraas' Vor der Sindfluth: Eine Geschichte der Urwelt (1866).