  |
|
|
|
Museum professionals work hard to create exhibits that provide visitors with accurate information. As the body of knowledge grows, some displays naturally become outdated. However, there have been times when exhibits in leading museums have been, ah, er, well...wrong.
Perhaps the most famous blunder involved our Victorian Age paleontologist, Othniel C. Marsh (see Real Dinosaurs! for more). In 1877 Marsh named Apatosaurus from a fossil found in Colorado. The name means "deceptive lizard" and it was a better choice than Marsh could have imagined. Two years later Marsh analyzed a near-complete skeleton discovered in Wyoming and named it Brontosaurus or "thunder lizard." Marsh believed that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were closely related species, but were distinct enough to place them in different classes. He was mistaken about that. Elmer Riggs, a paleontologist with Chicago's Field Museum, later determined that the Apatosaurus was an immature specimen of the Brontosaurus. The two dinosaurs were the same. Science adopted the earlier name, Apatosaurus, as the official one in 1903. But Brontosaurus thundered on in the public imagination for decades. The case of the headless Brontosaurus When the original Brontosaurus was unearthed, it was (and still is) one of the most complete sauropod skeletons ever found. The fossil, however, was missing its skull, a common occurrence in the world of paleontology. Marsh, caught up in dino fever, felt driven to exhibit ever new, amazing specimens. He decided to add a skull to his Brontosaurus / Apatosaurus mount for the Yale Peabody Museum. The skull he chose had been found 400 miles away and belonged to a Camarasaurus, a different beast entirely. Years later, in 1905 Henry Fairfield Osborn, head of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), was assembling another complete, but skull-less Apatosaurus skeleton. Knowing his exhibit would be much more popular with a head, Osborn added a plaster cast of a Marsh's Camarasaurus skull, though he most certainly knew it was incorrect. Osborn also knew he could get away with it. He had very carefully cultivated his reputation as the expert in the field. His influence among other scientists was so great, that to cross him could bring professional ruin. To this day, no Apatosaurus has ever been found with a skull attached, but in 1915, W.J. Holland, director of the Carnegie Museum
in Pittsburgh, reported the discovery of a new skeleton with a skull close by it. This skull was longer, slimmer and distinctly different from that on Osborn's specimen. Holland suspected that the
|
|
|
|
