ReviewBully for Apatosaurus
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Let the contest begin
Once the exclusive domain of entrepreneurial scientists like Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope, American vertebrate paleontology shifted gradually into large, urban science museums in the late 1890s. A fierce contest, dubbed the second American Jurassic dinosaur rush, erupted in this new institutional setting, pitting museum paleontologists from New York, Chicago and Pittsburgh against one another in a race to find and collect exhibit-quality dinosaurs. The contest instigated a wave
What's in a name?
Marsh, along with his archrival Cope, had done pioneering work on American Jurassic dinosaurs, establishing dozens of new taxa, many of which were deemed invalid by their successors. Because of their heated rivalry, they sometimes did hasty, slipshod work. Taxonomy honors its practitioners by attaching their monikers permanently to the scientific names they establish. In the late 19th century, in situations where more than one name was given to the same animal, the principle of strict priority
The rise and fall of Apatosaurus
Elmer Samuel Riggs, a paleontologist at Chicago's Field Columbian Museum, made a notorious contribution to sauropod taxonomy in 1903 (Figure 4). It appeared in his description of a well preserved but incomplete sauropod skeleton that he and his party collected near Fruita, Colorado in the summer of 1901. He had made a sweep through several eastern museums examining various dinosaur specimens and in New Haven, Connecticut, he had the opportunity to study Marsh's types. This is what he found:
The fallout for Riggs
There is one final point to be made regarding sauropod research during the second Jurassic dinosaur rush. When Osborn succeeded Marsh as vertebrate paleontologist for the US Geological Survey, he inherited his unfinished, government-funded projects. Osborn assigned a few of these to other paleontologists as a way of currying favor. But the choicest plum of the lot was probably the sauropod monograph, which he kept for himself. However, he was so busy with myriad other projects, most of them
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On the restoration of skeletons of fossil vertebrates
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(1909)Additional characters of the great herbivorous dinosaur Camarasaurus
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(1898)- Letter, H.F. Osborn to W. Granger, 2 May 1898, Department of Vertebrate Paleontology Archives, American Museum of...
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Fore and hind limbs of Sauropoda from the bone cabin quarry
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The second Jurassic dinosaur rush and the dawn of dinomania
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2016, History of Science