Deja vu

So as I mentioned, today meant a visit to the Academy of Natural Sciences, now related to Drexel University (known among paleontologists for their work on sauropods in Argentina, particularly and recently Dreadnoughtus.) The visit was made particularly special by the current choice of special exhibit.

The museum has other things, but mostly dinosaurs are everywhere. It has the collection of plants brought back by Lewis and Clark, a lot of taxidermy and diorama's (which are great, unless you're in an area that has a really awesome zoo and are thus spoiled by seeing these exotic animals actually alive...), a butterfly room, collections related to Leidy and Cope.... and then they were splitting at the seems with dinosaurs. Including a lab that was on display, animatronics (which small children kept referring to as the "real" dinosaurs), and the first mounted dinosaur.

Of course, such a place has a large draw for children and their parents. But it was worth being the biggest kid in the room to visit such a significant place in paleontological history.

Back in the early days of paleontology in the United States, a man named Foulk caught wind of a large bones found by a farmer and went to investigate. This led to the discovery of what was then the most complete dinosaur ever found. It was a duck billed dinosaur. He reconstructed it as a biped that walked a lot like a kangaroo, supporting its weight on its tail (look behind the triceratops frill in the picture to the right for a painting of his best guess.) It makes me laugh, it reminds me a lot of the giant ground sloths.

Here's how we would posture one today with the bones that he had available to him pictured.

So many people came to see the dinosaur that the museum actually had to start charging admission in a wild attempt to slow down the masses of traffic; the entry fee was ten cents.

The Academy of Natural Sciences, aside from having what was the first  mounted dinosaur, was also the home institution of Leidy and later his prodigy student, Cope. In case you've missed out on my other stories about them, Cope and Marsh had a bitter rivalry between them. They raced to name as many dinosaur species as possible while also bashing each other in the newspapers. Leidy actually would have been a third great mind in this rivalry had he not gotten sick of the mudslinging and decided to pursue something where there weren't people at each others throats. His other interests, like plants and insects and other things, sounded like a pretty calm field. They had a pretty good exhibit about his and Cope's contributions to science. Not being in Marsh's territory and being the home of his opponents, however, his name is only mentioned in passing.

It was a great time to visit the museum because in addition to the already beautiful dinosaur exhibit, there was a travelling exhibit visiting the museum filled with more (anamatronic) dinosaurs! They focused on stories, things that don't have the full consensus of the rest of the scientific community yet, including the "dueling dinosaurs" and Cleveland Lloyd Dinosaur Quarry.

Hey, that's familiar...

The story from the quarry that they chose to include was the predator trap; predators getting stuck in the mud while trying to get to their prey, which in a classic example is either stuck or already dead. It's one of the oldest hypotheses, although not necessarily well supported one way or another. Not that any of the other stories are well supported in this case.

Speaking of the quarry, after this it was down to Maryland to visit my lovely geologist friend Kaitlyn, the one and same that I interned with last summer. Of course, we couldn't get Mac to fly out from CA to meet us, but it was the first of hopefully many Quarry Crew reunions. Miss you already, Kaitlyn!