From: "Ken Carpenter" <KCarpenter@dmns.org>
Reply-To: KCarpenter@dmns.org
To: <ck.taylor@auckland.ac.nz>, <dinosaur@usc.edu>
CC: <WilsonY@CarnegieMNH.Org>
Subject: In defense of Marsh and Cope (was Roewer award for BadTaxonomy)
Date: Tue, 04 May 2004 09:24:52 -0600
As someone very much interested in the early works of Marsh and Cope
(among others), I feel a need to defend them. Too much emphasis has been
placed on what they did "wrong" rather than what they did "right."
First, put yourself in their shoes. At the time, very little is known about
dinosaurs (or any other prehistoric vertebrates). The only dinosaur
skeletons on display in North America were Hadrosaurus foulkii and
Dryptosaurus aquilunguis, both mounted in 1868 at the Academy of Natural
Sciences in Philadelphia. In 1877 (when the dinosaur "rush" of the West
began), the major museums with fossil dinosaur bones were the Academy of
Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, Princeton University, Barnum's American
Museum (not the AMNH), and the Peabody Museum at Yale University. There
were a few other, mostly smaller museums as well. None of these museums had
anything like a complete dinosaur skeleton. Even Hadrosaurus and
Dryptosaurus are less than 40% complete. The first complete dinosaur
skeletons to be found (Iguanodon bernissartensis) were still over a year
away.