The History Of Collecting Dinosaurs
Another thing to notice about Table 1.1 is that our knowledge of horned dinosaurs, and of course of all dinosaurs, has a history—and a very colorful and interesting history it is, as we shall see. There was a time when no one knew anything about dinosaurs. Indeed, the recognition of fossils themselves as the remains of once-living plants and animals that inhabited an ancient world was a very difficult intellectual accom
plishment that we too easily take for granted; we too readily heap scorn upon our ancestors who lacked this knowledge. Though fossils were observed and studied during the Renaissance, it was not until the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that paleontology, the study of fossils, came into its own.3
One of the earliest historical records of a dinosaur is an illustration published by Robert Plot in a 1677 natural history of Cambridgeshire. It was claimed to belong to a giant human, but it appears to be part of the thighbone of a megalosaur.4 Dinosaur remains were collected from the Normandy region of France as early as 1801, but the first dinosaur fossil formally described was collected in 1818 from near Stonesfield, Oxfordshire, England. It was described by Dean William Buckland in 1824 as Megalosaurus, a Middle Jurassic flesh-eater. Buckland (1784-1856) was a superb geologist and a notable eccentric who, among other oddities, kept a pet bear in his house at Oxford. In 1822, Gideon Mantell (17901852), a country physician, discovered several teeth in the Tilgate Forest in Sussex.5 Mantell was sufficiently focused on his fossils that his medical practice suffered. Eventually, his house was so filled with fossils that his wife took the children and left him. In 1825, he named the dinosaur Iguanodon.
By 1842, several additional kinds of dinosaurs had been described, all based on fragments. All that was understood was that these were the remains of extinct reptiles, and that they were very large. It was the brilliant and irascible anatomist and paleontologist Richard Owen (1804-1892) who made the intuitive leap to conclude that these remains indicated the existence of a "tribe" of extinct reptiles of large size whose structure approached that of large modern mammals, and for which he coined the name dinosaur, meaning "terrible lizard."6 Owen was one of the most important paleontologists of the nineteenth century, but he is often remembered today for his opposition to Darwin's theory of evolution. One interpretation is that he "invented" dinosaurs to prove the theory of progressive evolution wrong: reptiles had reached their peak (or "apotheosis," to use his term) in the Mesozoic and had gone downhill since that time.7
The first dinosaur fossils from the United States came from the Nebraska Territory (now Montana) in 1855 and were described by Joseph Leidy at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia in 1856. These too were fragmentary—a mere handful of teeth, as we shall see later. Avery important skeleton came to light in 1858, not from the great fossil beds of the American West, which were yet to be discovered, but from
Haddonfield, New Jersey! Leidy described this skeleton as Hadrosaurus foulkii, the first duck-billed dinosaur. Leidy (1823-1891) is honored as the father of American paleontology, but he made great contributions in parasitology and anatomy as well. He is also remembered as the gentlest of men; he once walked 20 miles on the Sabbath to release a frog in its home pond.
Leidy's young protege in Philadelphia was Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897), a devout Quaker with a fiery temperament. Cope was rich, brilliant, and eccentric. He published more than 1,400 papers on living and fossil vertebrates in his short lifetime. Cope plays an important part in our narrative because it was he who discovered and named the first horned dinosaur, Monoclonius crassus, in 1876. Also of note for us is Cope's lifelong hatred of O. C. Marsh. Marsh (1831-1899) was the nephew of George Peabody, a wealthy Baltimore merchant who, like Marsh, was a lifelong bachelor. Peabody established a museum and endowed a chair of paleontology at Yale University for his nephew. Marsh reciprocated Cope's dislike of him. Both Marsh and Cope used their wealth to obtain large collections of fossils from the American West, and each strove to outdo the other. Marsh was a better politician than Cope, and for many years enjoyed the resources of the U.S. government to further his paleontological ambitions. Marsh was a great student of American dinosaurs, and for our purposes he is of paramount importance because he recognized horned dinosaurs for what they were, overcoming his initial blunder of mistaking Triceratops for a bison! He described Triceratops in 1889 and Torosaurus in 1891. It was Marsh who coined the name Ceratopsidae for the family of horned dinosaurs.
Neither Marsh nor Cope was himself a great collector, though each made several ventures into the western fossil beds—Marsh with a military escort, Cope without, true to his Quaker ideals. Many collectors provided Marsh with fossils, though John Bell Hatcher (1861-1904) was arguably the greatest of these. He was largely responsible for the marvelous collection of Triceratops and Torosaurus skulls from Wyoming that Marsh enjoyed. Hatcher once kept an expedition to Patagonia solvent with his poker winnings! It fell to Hatcher to write the greater part of the magnificent monograph on ceratopsians planned but never written by Marsh. Hatcher himself died tragically of typhus at age forty-two, stopping in midsentence. The monograph was completed by Marsh's successor at Yale, Richard Swarm Lull (1867-1957), who named Diceratops in 1905. Published in 1907, it bears the names of Hatcher,
Marsh, and Lull in that order.' Cope employed the services of Charles Hazelius Sternberg (1850-1943), who accompanied him to the Judith River country of Montana on the 1876 expedition that netted Mono-clonius. C. H. Sternberg had three sons—George R, Charles M., and Levi—each of whom learned his father's profession in the American West and became a great collector on his own.
After Marsh and Cope died, dinosaur paleontology languished in Philadelphia and New Haven as the twentieth century unfolded. As a student at what is today Princeton University, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935) fell under the spell of Cope's charm and was won over to paleontology. Osborn, born to wealth and privilege as the son of a nineteenth-century railroad baron, came to New York after graduation and awakened a sleepy institution, the American Museum of Natural History, with his ambitious plans. He hired Barnum Brown (18731963), who became one of the greatest dinosaur fossil collectors of all time. After collecting the Tyrannosaurus specimens that brought great fame to the American Museum, Brown proceeded to Alberta at the invitation of a local rancher from Drumheller and continued his record of collecting great fossil treasures. Beginning in 1910, a steady stream of magnificent skeletons flowed to New York. For our purposes we note Leptoceratops and Anchiceratops, both of which Brown described in 1914. The energetic Brown, despite a lack of formal training, became a great scholar of dinosaurs. Although he did not name further kinds of horned dinosaurs, Brown and his associate, E. M. Schlaikjer, wrote a very important monograph on Protoceratops in 1940.' Only one new horned dinosaur came from the United States at this time, the small, enigmatic ceratopsid from Montana, Brachyceratops, described by C. W. Gilmore in 1914.
Faced with the loss of paleontological treasures to the United States, the Canadian government in Ottawa responded in 1912 by hiring C. H. Sternberg and his three sons to come to Alberta and begin the hunt for dinosaurs. This they accomplished with great success. Initially Canadian fossils were described in Ottawa by National Museum of Canada paleontologist Lawrence M. Lambe (1863-1919). Lambe visited the Alberta fossil beds in 1899 and 1900. Lacking expertise in collecting methods, he had only modest success. He described Centrosaurus in 1904 on the basis of a fragmentary skull. Beginning in 1912, however, he had his own trove of splendid fossils, as the Sternberg fossils began to arrive in Ottawa. Descriptions quickly followed, notably of Styracosaurus in 1913 and Chasmosaurus in 1914. Lambe is remembered in the name Lambeo-
saurus lambei, a duck-bill named by W. A. Parks in his honor, as well as in the Lambeosaurinae, the subfamily of crested duck-bills. Lambe died suddenly in 1919, and his work was taken over by C. M. Sternberg (1885-1981), the greatest student of Canadian dinosaurs. Sternberg described new species of Centrosaurus, Monoclonius, and Triceratops in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1950, he described a bizarre new hornless horned dinosaur of large size, Pachyrhinosaurus, which has now been found at a number of sites in Alberta as well as Alaska. In 1951, Sternberg described three complete skeletons of Leptoceratops and named Montanoceratops.
Meanwhile, back in New York, the hunt for Canadian dinosaurs had ended during the war years, and as the 1920s dawned fresh challenges were needed. Osborn, who in 1923 described the horned dinosaur Pentaceratops from New Mexico, is best remembered for his studies of fossil mammals, especially elephants. As early as 1900, he predicted that fossil human ancestors would be found in Central Asia. The flamboyant adventurer Roy Chapman Andrews sold Osborn on the idea of mounting an expedition to Mongolia in 1922 to search for human ancestors. With Osborn's society connections and Andrews's worldly charm, a number of expeditions were financed with support from Manhattan high society. The expeditions failed to find human ancestors but instead brought back a marvelous cache of previously unknown dinosaurs, including dozens of Protoceratops skulls and skeletons and remains of the proto-horned dinosaur, Psittacosaurus. Both of these ceratopsians were described in 1923.
No further dinosaurs were brought back from Mongolia to New York after 1925. The Soviets mounted several expeditions to Mongolia after World War II, but for our purposes it is the Polish-Mongolian expeditions of 1965-1971 that are of great interest. For one thing, the expedition leader, Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, as well as the principal scientists were all women. More to the point, new protoceratopsids were found. Most notable was Bagaceratops, described in 1975 by Teresa Maryariska and Halszka Osm61ska, who the previous year had become the first (but not the last!) women to describe new kinds of dinosaurs. Recently, Soviet paleontologists have described additional new protoceratopsids: Breviceratops in 1990 and Udanoceratops in 1992.
No new kinds of long-frilled, chasmosaurine ceratopsids have been described since the description of Arrhinoceratops from Alberta by W. A. Parks in 1925.10 After a long pause beginning in 1950, new short-frilled centiosaurines have now been discovered in Montana. I had the good fortune to discover and name Avaceratops from south-central Montana in 1986, and Scott Sampson described two new kinds, Einiosaurus and Achelousaurus, from north-central Montana in 1995.
This then is a thumbnail sketch of the history of the discovery of the horned dinosaurs that will be the subject of this book. A rich and interesting history it is, indeed. It is a history of fits and starts, of wrong turns and errors, of human vanity and wealth, of dogged determination and persistence. This is so because science is a human activity, not one done by machines. The fossil record is not simply an objective fact of nature. Fossils are objective documents, but the fossil record represents our knowledge of that document, and the way in which we have acquired that knowledge is a very human story. It takes wealth to acquire knowledge. Where would dinosaur paleontology be today had Marsh and Cope been required to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brows? If Osborn had not been so well connected to affluent white Anglo-Saxon Protestant New York society? If Roy Chapman Andrews had not been so successful at charming money out of the privileged elite? I strongly suspect that this book, although it would have been written, would not have been written for another hundred years. Today we are the beneficiaries of a rich legacy of ceratopsian fossils. The task of making sense of these fossils falls to the paleontologist.
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