I grew up in New Haven, Connecticut, which means I grew up going to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. When my family and I visited this museum masquerading as a Gothic cathedral, we’d see the pinned insects, the taxidermied birds, the giant Olmec head, and, of course, the dinosaurs. I wasn’t really a science kid (I became a historian for a reason), but the 65-foot long Brontosaurus excelsus standing in the museum’s Great Hall was the landmark of my childhood.
Brontosaurs excelsus in the Great Hall at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, tosh chiang, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A few years ago, I went back to the Peabody. I’d started working at the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia—a natural history museum whose exhibit hall is preserved from the 19th century—and I was making the rounds of its peer institutions, museums I hadn’t visited since I was a kid. Like the Wagner, these places—the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, the American Museum of Natural History in New York, the Peabody in New Haven—had been around since the 19th century. While they operated as science museums, they were history museums too. And they were my history no less than they were the history of science writ large.
In New Haven, I walked back into the Great Hall with its Brutalist concrete walls and its murals of prehistoric life. I looked up at that Brontosaurus just like I had when I was a kid. My first thought was that it seemed smaller than I remembered, but there was something else that I noticed for the first time. That giant, fossilized skeleton was held up by a second skeleton. The dinosaur had steel posts running up into its chest and its pelvis. It had wires stringing its ribs together. And it had this elegant steel armature that curved from its head, down its long, long neck, across its back, and out to its tail.
The second skeleton. Photo by the author.
In his history of the Peabody, Richard Conniff describes it as a “cumbersome steel understructure.”1 Looking at that dinosaur and noticing the second skeleton for the first time, I saw something else. I saw a specimen of science and the natural world, of course, but I also saw a beautiful object constructed, created, by people—by paleontologists, museum curators, engineers, and welders.
Museums construct knowledge. As a historian of museums this is what I study. But museums don’t just construct knowledge through architecture, collecting, arrangement, or labeling. They construct knowledge by constructing objects—literally.
This Brontosaurus was collected in 1879 from a quarry at Como Bluffs, Wyoming.2 But before it arrived in New Haven, it was a prize to be won in the Bone Wars waged by Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale and Edward Drinker Cope of the Academy of Natural Sciences, two of the most prominent paleontologists of their day. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s, they competed with one another, first for territory in which to dig for bones, and then for possession of the bones themselves. When William Harlow Reed and William Edward Carlin discovered the fossils at Como Bluffs, they wrote to Marsh to see if he was interested in them. In their letter, they recognized the secrecy necessary to guard against rival collectors like Cope. Once the quarries were open, deceit continued, with Cope’s men spying on and even sabotaging Marsh’s fossil beds. Marsh returned the favor by destroying fossils outright so Cope couldn’t have them.3
As heated (and petty and counterproductive) as this was, the heart of the competition between Marsh and Cope was over who would be the first to turn those bones into species by naming and describing them for publication in scientific journals back East. They sought out dinosaurs because they were the cutting edge of scientific research into evolution and extinction. They also sought out dinosaurs because they believed the drama of these giant, terrible lizards was sure to bring them immortality with scientists and the public alike.4
Marsh and Cope cared about science in their own way. They cared about advancing our understanding of the lost worlds hidden beneath our feet. But the Bone Wars and the Brontosaurus were also about competition to see who could be first. They were about naming, describing, and ordering the world, then putting it under glass. They were about possession, private property, and ownership of the world—and knowledge itself.
When I look at dinosaurs now, I see this human history as much as I see natural history. Dinosaurs are a reminder that the way things are now is not the way they’ve always been. The Brontosaurus once lived in a vast landscape that looked little like the Wyoming we know now. Then it was buried for millions of years, turning from bone into rock. It was uncovered in 1879, and it arrived in New Haven not long after. Marsh named it Brontosaurus, thunder lizard. Elmer Riggs at the Field Museum in Chicago reclassified it as Apatosaurus in 1903.5 It was mounted at the Peabody and unveiled to the public in 1931.6 It got a more accurate head in 1981.7 The museum acknowledged Riggs’ reclassification in 2003. It then restored the original classification in 2015 based on new research.8 And in February of 2020, the museum dismantled the Brontosaurus and sent it to Canada for cleaning as the museum closed for a major renovation. In a few years, it will be reconstructed in a “more scientifically accurate” pose.9
When the museum reopens, the 1930s armature will be gone. It makes me a little sad. Still, the fact that the museum acknowledges the changing nature of scientific knowledge provides a powerful appreciation of science, history, and the idea that knowledge isn’t fixed—it’s constructed. The shifting understanding of these ancient creatures shows that Marsh alone is not responsible for our understanding of the past, or our understanding of these objects. Even if he and the Peabody can possess the bones, they cannot possess the knowledge because it changes. The Brontosaurus can’t help but teach us that scientific knowledge is a lot like historical knowledge. We construct and reconstruct the past because there are always new ways to understand it.
- Richard Conniff, House of Lost Worlds: Dinosaurs, Dynasties, and the Story of Life on Earth, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016), 90.
- Keith Thomson, The Legacy of the Mastodon: The Golden Age of Fossils in America, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 292. The excavation was supervised by William Harlow Reed, a former railroad man now employed by Marsh as a fossil man. He, of course, gets little credit in science books. History books have treated him somewhat better.
- Thomson, 287-292.
- Thomson.
- Conniff, 90.
- “’Thunder Lizard’ On View at Yale,” New York Times, 12 June 1931.
- “Yale Brontosaurus Gets its Head on Right at Last,” New York Times, 26 October 1981.
- Jim Shelton, “Return of the Brontosaurus: Q&A with the Peabody’s Jacques Gauthier,” Yale News, 13 April 2020.
- “How to Take Down a Brontosaurus,” Yale News, 25 February 2020.
