Restoration of some European dinosaurs : with suggestions as to their place among the Reptilia / by O.C. Marsh.

  • Othniel Charles Marsh
Date:
1895
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Restoration of some European dinosaurs : with suggestions as to their place among the Reptilia / by O.C. Marsh. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    Ton are all doubtless familiar with the story told by your witty countryman, George Lewes, in his life of Goethe, of an international attempt to reconstruct the camel. To complete this task, the Englishman, it is said, travelled to distant lands, studied the animal in its native wilds, and then prepared his report; the Frenchman went to the museum in Paris, exam- ined stuffed specimens and skeletons, and wrote his account; while the German remained in his study at home, meditated on the subject, and finally evolved his idea of the camel from his inner consciousness. Similar methods, but not on the same international lines, have been followed in the case of the Dinosaurs, and if some of those that have been restored could speak, whatever they might say about the prehistoric enemies that destroyed them, they would surely ask to be saved from their latter-day friends. Seriously, I think justice has not been done to this remark- able group of reptiles in rehabilitating them for the benefit of the rising generation in science, and some of the attempts, I fear, have been so firmly implanted in text-book literature, that, like the oft-repeated myth of the coral insect, the errors will pass down to the next century before being erad- icated. The German method has sometimes been used by Anglo-Saxons, and with a success quite equal to that in the case of the camel. To take one instance familiar to you all, let me mention Megalosaurus, the first Dinosaur described, and also Igiianodon, an herbivorous colleague, on which it doubtless preyed. The first restoration of these two reptiles made them, as they were supposed to be in life, quadrupedal, or four-footed animals of forbidding aspect, and as such they have since haunted the visions of several generations, young and old, by night and by day. I have just made a pilgrimage to Sydenham to see with my own eyes these famous restora- tions, and, so far as I can judge, there is nothing like unto them in the heavens, or on the earth, or in the waters under the earth. We now know from good evidence that both Megalosaurus and Iguanodon were bipedal, and to represent them as creeping, except in their extreme youth, would be almost as incongruous as to do this by the genus Homo. Lest it be supposed that I consider the Dinosaurs alone to have suffered from the attempts of their friends to restore them to life, I might recall to your remembrance the well- known figure in the text-books, of Dinot/ierium, reclining peacefully, with its feet and limbs concealed, for the simple reason that no one knew anything about them ; or that other picture of the Lahyrinthodon without a tail, deliberately making foot-prints upon the sands of time, while no such form has yet been discovered. I might refer to still more frightful examples of the dangers encountered by over-zealous historians of ancient life, but those given will suffice. a
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