American Dinosaur Abroad: A Cultural History of Carnegie's Plaster Diplodocus

AMERICAN DINOSAUR ABROAD

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF CARNEGIE’S PLASTER DIPLODOCUS

ILJA NIEUWLAND

UNIVERSITY OF PITTSBURGH PRESS

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260

Copyright © 2019, University of Pittsburgh Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Printed on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress

ISBN 13: 978-0-8229-4557-4

ISBN 10: 0-8229-4557-6

Cover design by Alex Wolfe

ISBN-13: 978-0-8229-8666-9 (electronic)

For Marieke

CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Note on Names and Classification

Note on Translation and Transcription

Introduction: A Convoluted Dinosaur

1. Dinomania: Giant Sloths, Sea Snakes, and Concrete Contraptions

2. His Majesty Notices a Drawing: The Tradition of Copying Dinosaurs

3. Getting Diplodocus Ready for the Stage: From Pittsburgh to London

4. The Years of Wandering: Germany

5. Visite au Diplodocus: Paris

6. Properly Messy: Crouching Dinosaurs, National Competition, and Science Reform

7. Diaspora: From Rio to Madrid

Conclusion: Diplodocus after Madrid—and after Carnegie

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

In the Western world, not many places are left where the existence of man can be ignored, where there is no trace of civilization in sight apart from the vehicle that brought you there. Sheep Creek, Wyoming, is such a place. In the autumn of 2010 I was lucky enough to visit this location, the place where it all began. Together with Tom Rea, Beth Southwell, and Brent Breithaupt, I visited the site where the fossilized bones of Diplodocus carnegii had been uncovered in the years between 1899 and 1902. Tom is the author of Bone Wars, an excellent book that details the discovery, preparation, and display of this great dinosaur; Brent and Beth worked at the University of Wyoming’s Geological Museum. To visit such a place with them was a great experience, the more because we were able to recover several small fossil scraps that in all probability didn’t belong to Diplodocus. But for me, that wasn’t the greatest find. Around what had probably been a campfire site we discovered a number of cans, sealed off with wax, that had been used by one of the parties that came here looking for fossils. More than the fossils themselves they created a connection with the people who had been working here: Olof Peterson, William Reed, John Bell Hatcher, and two of the main characters of this book, Arthur Coggeshall and William Holland.

It was Tom’s book that rekindled my interest in the story of Diplodocus. My first confrontation with the history of paleontology had been through Adrian Desmond’s The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs, from 1976, or rather its Dutch translation that appeared two years later. As a child, I always was a voracious reader of anything related to dinosaurs. It was an enthusiasm that was regarded with some suspicion by my parents, not least because it involved annotating and thus improving various entries in their brand-new encyclopedia.

But there wasn’t much in the way of Dutch-language reading matter, and what was there did not present dinosaurs in a way that I felt they deserved. These were the dinosaurs of William Elgin Swinton and Neave Parker: gray or brown humps of organic matter plowing through swamps, anticipating well-deserved extinction. Even the eternal confrontation between the terrible predator Tyrannosaurus and the fearsome horned herbivore Triceratops appeared to have lost much of the energy it had contained in the paintings of Charles Knight around the beginning of the century.

For my tenth birthday, I was presented with a copy of Desmond’s book. It stood out from most other books for its relative dearth of illustrations and a text that demanded a degree of familiarity with history that I certainly did not possess. Desmond spoke of people I had never heard of before: Andrew Carnegie, Henry Fairfield Osborn, Gustav Tornier, and others. But it presented dinosaurs in an exciting, new light. The Hot-Blooded Dinosaurs is mainly an advertisement for new theories forwarded by scientists in the 1970s. John Ostrom, Robert T. Bakker, and their adherents showed dinosaurs as agile, active creatures instead of the leaden dullards of old. This was the information my ten-year-old mind had been waiting for. In addition to this information about exciting new theories, Desmond—a historian of science, after all—offered much background. But it was this rich history of vertebrate paleontology that soon became my main source of interest. After all these years, much of Desmond’s book holds up pretty well. The reason, I think, is that it is mostly a book about people: the scientists who were fascinated by the riddle of these enigmatic creatures that only revealed themselves very slowly through time. Likewise, the text you are about to read is more involved with people than it is with dinosaurs.

The book before you is based on a diverse collection of primary sources, from museum archives via scientific treatises to vintage newspapers. Newspaper research used to be a frustrating and very time-consuming effort. Happily, in recent years a plethora of digitization and publication projects have made these sources very easy to navigate; particularly, the French National Library’s Gallica site (http://gallica.bnf.fr) has been important in developing these online resources. Other countries have followed suit, and sites such as Chronicling America (http://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov) and the Spanish Hemerotéca Digital (http://www.bne.es/es/Catalogos/HemerotecaDigital/) offer a very research-friendly experience. Therefore, much of this book is based on these resources. However, it is still impossible to rely entirely on such services. First of all, not all digitized newspapers are publicly accessible, while others can only be read after paying a subscription fee. Ill-conceived interfaces can make research almost as time-intensive as going through physical newspapers used to be. And among all the triumphalism of national libraries’ publicity departments, it is particularly easy to forget that substantial numbers of newspapers and magazines have never been scanned and made available. To get an idea of newspaper reporting in Germany, for instance, one remains still largely dependent on newspaper archives, a situation exacerbated by the historically regional character of the country, which makes it unlikely that a grand national project along the lines of Gallica shall ever get off the ground.

Finding primary sources in natural history museums can be problematic, too. While some institutions have taken steps to preserve their heritage, others have neglected historical documentation to the point where its conservation is now under threat. Again, if such resources are available, digitization can offer a way out. For this project, the Carnegie Museum’s Diplodocus Archive has been tremendously useful, even though they provide only half the picture without William Holland’s personal papers, which are unfortunately crumbling in the museum archives.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Paleontology is a historical science, and many of its workers are very aware of the discipline’s history. Many of them have been of great help to me. Others haven’t, but we will ignore them for the moment.

A great number of people helped me in getting this book finished. It would be impossible to name everyone, but there are a few I wish to single out for the invaluable assistance they provided. Samuel Alberti, Paul Barrett, Nikolaus Bernau, Raf de Bont, Brent Breithaupt, Jannie Bruining, Sebastiaan Derks, Judy Cerini, Ger Dijkstra, Femke Eerland, Erno Endenburg, Donna L. Hay, Henrik Hofer, Ernst Homburg, Esther van Gelder, Eric Jorink, Catarina Madruga, Heinrich Mallison, Gerhard Meier, Stefan Meng, Andrea Meyer, Ben Miller, Markus Moser, Darren Naish, Johan Nieuwland, Pascal Nieuwland, Adán Perez-Garcia, Milo van de Pol, Irina Podgorny, Matthijs de Ridder, Joachim Scholz, Zè Silva, Beth Southwell, Abel Streefland, Brian Switek, Fenneke Sysling, Mike A. Taylor, Ray Troll, André Veldmeijer, Rienk Vermij, Herman Voogd, John de Vos, Andreas Weber, Martin Weiss, John Waller, Gerben Zaagsma, Laura Zampatti, and Tim de Zeeuw each contributed to this text in their own way.

Usually anonymous entities in the background of historical research, a number of archivists have been singularly helpful in accessing source material. Without the help of Daisy Cunninghame (London), Sabine Hacketal (Berlin), Amy Henrici (Pittsburgh), Andrea Holling (Worms), Brigitte Lotz (Frankfurt), Gregory Raml (New York), Lisa Sisco (Pittsburgh), and Joachim Scholz (Frankfurt), this text would have taken even more hours and kilometers than it did, and I want to pay tribute to their invaluable services. If I have not mentioned you, that does not mean that I’ve forgotten what you did for me.

As for historians of paleontology, there are comparatively few of us, and it has always been great fun and use engaging with the community. I particularly want to thank Paul Brinkman, Eric Buffetaut, Jean Le Loeuff, Chris Manias, Irina Podgorny, Lukas Rieppel, Christoph Roolf, David Sepkoski, Marco Tamborini, Klaus Taschwer, and Mareike Vennen for inspiring talks and a lot of genuine support during the years it took me to get this done. I am particularly grateful to Tom Rea, in many ways my predecessor in Diplodocus history research (if there is such a thing) for his interest in, and willingness to discuss, this project.

Three of Otto Jaekel’s grandchildren, Eckart Schwarz van Berk, Christoph Hirsch, and Eike Christian Hirsch, were so kind as to give me access to what private papers of his they had, and they showed me sides to Jaekel’s personality I might not otherwise have learned of.

The Huygens Institute for the History of the Netherlands of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and more particularly Henk Wals, Charles van den Heuvel, and Lex Heerma van Voss, gave me time to devote to this book and sometimes turned a blind eye if things took slightly more time than anticipated. That and a grant from the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research allowed me to get the project off the ground and, eventually, finished. My colleagues at the VU University of Amsterdam, Azadeh Achbari, David Baneke, Danny Beckers, Ab Flipse, Ida Stamhuis, and most of all Frans van Lunteren, I thank for the scrunity to which they subjected my chapters. I am grateful to my thesis supervisors, Frans van Lunteren and Klaas van Berkel, for keeping faith even in times where I had lost it; and without my officemate and friend Huib Zuidervaart I might never have started this project to begin with.

Writing a book in a nonnative language is always a daunting task. My editor at the University of Pittsburgh Press, Abby Collier, deserves special praise for the way she steered what was quite a rough text toward becoming a cohesive book, and if it almost looks as though a native speaker wrote it that is a credit to my copy editor, Amy Sherman. But finally and most of all, I need to thank my wife, Marieke van der Duin, whose continual support gave and still gives me the sense of purpose to complete this work—and put up with me while I did so. Piekebaas, this book is for you.

NOTE ON NAMES AND CLASSIFICATION

In the Linnaean system of classification, an organism’s scientific name is made up of two parts (binominal): e.g., Homo sapiens. The first of these words, the generic name, denotes the genus to which the organism belongs, the lowest of the super-specific classifications in the system. The second refers to the species.

When talking about extinct animals by their scientific name, it has become customary to use their generic (e.g., Tyrannosaurus) rather than their specific (rex) name. There are some risks attached to this practice; to give just one example, the present-day leopard, lion, and tiger all belong to the genus Panthera, yet we would never confuse one for the other. Likewise, to talk about Diplodocus means talking about a whole category of animals. However, extinct genera are often defined much more narrowly in range than are extant animals, for a multitude of reasons.

The vernacular practice or referring to extinct animals by genus was established more or less by practice: because many early dinosaur finds were known only through a single (often fragmentary) specimen, and also because many early paleontologists established the habit of splitting: they adorned each new find automatically with a new generic and specific name. This tendency was almost carried into satire during the bone wars that took place between Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope (and their assistants) in the 1870s, 1880s, and early 1890s. These men tended to measure their success (or failure) by the number of different taxa they discovered and described, which made taxonomic fragmentation almost inevitable. In this book, I will be referring to generic names unless the specific ones become relevant (e.g., Diplodocus carnegii vs. Diplodocus longus). Colloquial use of names of extinct dinosaurs almost never includes their specific name, with a few particularly eye-catching exceptions—Tyrannosaurus rex being the most famous.

Although Thomas Henry Huxley already published on the affinities of dinosaurs to birds in 1870, the influential synthesis The Origin of Birds by Gerhard Heilmann (1926) drew a clear line between the two groups.¹ Moreover, it affirmed the view (pioneered by Harry Govier Seeley) that Richard Owen’s Dinosauria (1842) was in fact a construct of two only distantly related categories of animals, the Saurischia (lizard-hipped dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus and Diplodocus) and the Ornithischia (bird-hipped dinosaurs like Triceratops or Iguanodon). Since the 1960s, a number of new finds and reevaluations of existing ones have led to new ideas about their relationship. Today, the consensus view is very much that birds are part of the Dinosauria. Consequently, modern literature usually refers to nonavian dinosaurs when talking about the extinct branches of the family. However, as this work deals primarily with the first two decades of the twentieth century, I shall be using the dominant scientific view vernacular of that period: dinosaurs always refers to nonavian dinosaurs, and dinosaurs are regarded as a phylogenetically unified collection of animals.

NOTE ON TRANSLATION AND TRANSCRIPTION

In this book, I have mostly used the local, contemporary names for institutions and locales, unless this would cause undue confusion. So instead of using, for instance, the widely applied Humboldt Museum, I’ve gone with the German Museum für Naturkunde; likewise I’ve opted for using, for instance, Breslau instead of Wroclaw. The wording is chosen to remain as close as possible to that used by my protagonists and sources. With most other cities I have used the contemporary form. For Russian spelling and transcription, I have adhered to the common transcription to American English. So Чернышёв becomes Chernyshev. All translations from German, French, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish, unless otherwise noted, are my own, and all mistakes made in them are therefore solely my responsibility.

Introduction

A CONVOLUTED DINOSAUR

AT THE END OF JANUARY 2015, British newspapers reported that Dippy, a plaster cast of the skeleton of the sauropod dinosaur Diplodocus carnegii that had dominated the central hall of London’s Natural History Museum since 1979, was going to be replaced by the skeleton of a blue whale, suspended from the ceiling of the hall. What would happen to Dippy the Diplodocus initially remained unclear, and various ideas circulated, including putting it in a glass case in front of the museum or having it tour the United Kingdom. From the outset, reactions to the museum’s decision were mixed but outspoken, which explains why the museum had evidently attempted to orchestrate the publication of the plans as much as possible. One irate paleontologist even condemned the replacement as vandalism.¹

The museum’s public relations rhetoric centered on a desire to stay relevant and move with the times.² One commentator remarked that this suggested that the story of mass extinction, such as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs, was somehow no longer relevant. Perhaps the most damning comment, however, was that Dippy was just a copy, as opposed to the real whale skeleton. As museum educator Ben Miller pointed out, that statement showed some ignorance regarding the importance of casts in the everyday practice of both science and museum work.³ But the message that was given to the public, and obviously used in favor of the replacement, was that Dippy was nothing more than a fake—and therefore worthless.⁴ Worse, the word fake even implies malevolence, and a desire to deceive the public.

Alas, glory can be fleeting. It had not been that long ago that Dippy was a source of pride for the museum. In 2010 the museum devoted a small book to the history and biology of the Diplodocus, and when the BBC came by to make a five-part documentary a year later, the animal’s role was as central in the first episode as it was in the main hall. Museum curator Paul Barrett was seen to extoll the animal’s educational and historical significance—attention well warranted, because the cast, real or not, had been one of the most important objects in the history of the museum—an importance to which the derogatory definition just a copy does little justice.⁵ But a planned refitting of the hall, and—as some suggested—a desire to clear up floorspace for corporate events, had dealt a decisive blow to what had been the pride of the museum until shortly before.⁶

Now, it seems, it will be the first victim of a new round of natural history museum reforms. But its fame will save the cast from the museum vaults for a while, as it is currently touring British museums as a temporary exhibit. After the tour, in all likelihood the plaster dinosaur will meet an inglorious end in the basement of the museum; meanwhile, there has been talk of a more weather-resistant cast gracing the garden in front of the museum. And yes, that would mean that in this case, a cast is to be recast. What that means for authenticity or relevance is anybody’s guess.

What makes Dippy’s fate so ironic is that it is the exact opposite of a movement still going on elsewhere. When natural history museums were outfitted with grand new buildings as part of the museum professionalization that took place during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, large skeletons of whales had often starred as the main attraction: a suitable way to impress new visitors. And probably no display was more responsible for that than Dippy itself. Like all museum objects, the famous Diplodocus cast is somewhat of a paradox: its fixed state as well-preserved and motionless artifact in the churchlike setting of the Natural History Museum is at odds with the many and different meanings that have been read (and written) into it. In fact, Diplodocus carnegii’s seemingly static life has been rather turbulent. To understand this dynamic, the public, social, scientific, and political context of the plaster cast must be taken into account.

Dippy has been the centerpiece of the Natural History Museum since it was moved from the Gallery of Reptiles (today’s insect section) to its central courtyard, now renamed Hintze Hall. It is a plaster cast of a fossil from Pittsburgh and has been part of the museum since it was unveiled in the presence of more than two hundred British worthies in April of 1905. The exchange of casts of fossils between museums was nothing new by 1905; natural history museums had long sought to complete their fossil collections this way. After all, photographs or drawings were of limited use in conveying the physical aspects of a fossil, and traveling abroad to examine specimens remained a costly affair. For most purposes of early twentieth-century paleontological research, casts would do as well as the originals they were based on. Casts were also relatively valueless—and financially, although not scientifically, worthless. If one broke, a new one could be made, and they needn’t be subject to the same ethical and practical concerns that governed the treatment of authentic fossils. For public display they were easier to work with, as mounting them required far less care than original fossils needed. Art museums had long worked with casts of objects for similar reasons. Lukas Rieppel describes casts as a compromise medium, but this undersells their added value. It was exactly their lack of monetary value that made them uniquely valuable to museums in other respects.⁷

But Diplodocus was different for a number of reasons. First of all, it was very big, and big was important in Europe during the Belle Époque. Often described at the time as the largest animal ever to walk the earth, its twenty-six meters dwarfed anything available for museum display save for whale skeletons. It was also a good deal larger than most dinosaurs uncovered up to that time. The early twentieth century was a time of huge things: grand feats of engineering, gigantic military installations and equipment, and big, bold ambition. Often, these carried nationalist overtones—for instance, when a new building needed to be compared to other, preferably slightly less impressive, structures. And although this has often been seen as an American trait, it is omnipresent in much of Western culture of the Belle Époque. Germans celebrated their zeppelins, the French the Eiffel Tower, the British their dreadnoughts and ocean liners. Outgrowing the (national) competition was seen to be important.

Still, the discovery of a giant dinosaur by the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh was not unique—a Brontosaurus skeleton discovered a little earlier and unveiled at the American Museum in February of 1905 was almost as long as (and larger in mass than) Diplodocus. But Andrew Carnegie’s Diplodocus gained unprecedented status because of the uses to which it was put and the channels that were used to publicize it. Diplodocus’s scientific and entertainment value (and any combination thereof) was still less important than its social and political associations, which imbued the plaster cast, normally an object of very limited value, with a different set of meanings that made it perhaps even more valuable than some original fossils. As a gift from the Scottish-born American tycoon Andrew Carnegie to King Edward VII, the London cast always carried associations with those people and the worlds they represented: high politics and tycoon entrepreneurism.

At the time of the donation, Carnegie, once the richest man in the world, had already spent a sizable part of his fortune in pursuit of philanthropic causes. He could alternately be a figure of admiration, loathing, and wonder, and that contributed to interest in everything he did. In subsequent years Carnegie would donate another six copies of the dinosaur to museums throughout Europe, and another one to the Museo de La Plata in Argentina.⁸ Diplodocus became, without question, the most-watched dinosaur in the world and a household name, at least for a while, in many European countries. It exerted an influence on European culture that went far beyond that of other dinosaurs. For the press, both the animal itself and its connection with high politics were ample justification to exhaust itself in superlatives. Even more attractive was its ambivalence, an imbued combination of awe and ridicule. Diplodocus itself, although big and powerful, was also time and again emphasized as being a slow, stupid, and very extinct animal.

The first decade and a half of the twentieth century have often been looked upon as little more than a prelude to the First World War. In his book The Vertigo Years (2008), Philipp Blom defines it as a time of contrast, with horrific butchery in the Congo and South Africa on the one hand and great creativity and belief in a better future on the other. This was also a dynamic time, one in which the collapse of many old ways became noticeable. American tycoons, wealthy beyond belief, showed that birth no longer needed to determine one’s life and future—if you were lucky. Ever-increasing amounts of spare time created a true leisure industry; and although one could devote one’s time to personal improvement, there were also more than enough opportunities to engage in more hedonistic activities, such as sports, concerts, or the cinema. The difference between the two wasn’t always clear-cut, either: moving pictures might provide education, while the new zoos that came into being in the new century combined the public’s lust for sensation with education.

At the heart of this new world was a scientific revolution that caused a paradigmatic change in the Western worldview. The work of Rutherford, the Curies, Einstein, Becquerel, and Freud laid a new foundation for our understanding of the world and of the human psyche. This was perhaps the last time in human history in which unfettered trust in scientific method and scientific advances could be considered commonplace, and one in which the pursuit of scientific knowledge carried a prestige it never regained. The establishment in 1901 of the Nobel Prizes marked the pinnacle of that trend: not only did it aim to give science and scientists public recognition, it also came with substantial material rewards. Furthermore, the prizes were personal, and turned their recipients into stars.

And the public wanted to be told about it. Newspapers and illustrated magazines brought not only political news but an increasing amount of other information—and science turned out to be newsworthy as well. The age’s lust for the gigantic, the outrageous, and the sensational was amply fed by the discovery of the remains of ever-stranger animals in the New World. Of course, dinosaurs had been around (under that name) since the 1840s, but the American discoveries were bigger and bolder than any before them. More importantly, they were being properly marketed, and none more so than Diplodocus. The reception and valuation of the fossil and its cast cannot be seen apart from developments taking place in the mass media—especially the way the press developed in different ways, depending on national and geographical contexts.

The upheaval of the Belle Époque was mirrored by turbulent developments in the press. The 1890s, often described as the gilded age of newspaper journalism, were followed by a period dominated by mass publications in search for as large a readership as possible. Increasingly, these sought to include a broader cultural experience: news mixed with entertainment, gossip, and prose, but also useful knowledge.⁹ But the picture is by no means uniform: the press in the United Kingdom and United States differed in important respects from various practices on the European continent. Here, the Yellow Press that favored eye-catching headlines over factual reporting set the tone around 1900. In France, the press enjoyed a great deal of freedom, but it was sharply politicized, like so much of public life—a politicization that had been further catalyzed by the Dreyfus affair. Radicals were pitted against clericals, conservatives against socialists, and the church against the state. Germany was different from all because it remained so culturally fragmented despite formal political unification. In effect, there was never a truly national German newspaper. Some publications might have enjoyed such a de facto status, such as the Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt in economic reporting, or the Vossische Zeitung from Berlin in the field of politics. But they remained fundamentally rooted in their local contexts. A newspaper such as the Frankfurter still reads like a very provincial publication apart from its financial section. Political controversies were traditionally avoided, even after censorship became laxer, leaving room for other kinds of reporting, op-ed pieces, and feuilletons.¹⁰ Although the impact of American journalism in Germany was not as profound as in Great Britain, a gradual modernization of the press from the 1880s onward shows unmistakable signs of American influences. It coincides with a massive rise in circulation: General-Anzeiger, newspapers with mixed content, such as the Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, could claim two hundred thousand copies sold. Actual readership would be much larger, since newspaper subscriptions were often shared.¹¹ Meanwhile, if we look past these technologically more advanced countries, a very different picture emerges. The Austrian and Russian presses still existed under the active oversight of the censor, which made quick and accurate reporting quite difficult. Moreover, their readership remained much more socially and economically restricted, and mostly urban.¹²

The forces of politics, science, representation, and media that shaped the biography of the casts cannot be seen as separated and isolated objects of study. Diplodocus’s prominence in the public sphere, and implicitly, also its politics, bore consequences for the treatment of the animal in scientific circles. Even by early twentieth-century standards, it was not particularly interesting from a scientific viewpoint, since many other sauropods had been known since the 1870s. But otherwise obscure deliberations gained far more prominence now that they concerned a famous citizen.

Even a superficial inspection of the story of Diplodocus reveals a multitude of actors and interests at work. The motivator of the whole project, Andrew Carnegie, determined the initial direction and scope of the undertaking, while his natural history museum in Pittsburgh worked basically as a contractor. However, Carnegie’s interests were not always those of the museum—or rather, the museum’s interests extended beyond (for them) the narrow agenda that Carnegie had defined. Then there were Carnegie’s partners in the project, the heads of state he wished to influence, who sometimes had their own reasons to go along with the donation and to present it in a certain way. These communicated with their domestic museums, whose relationship with power and empire might coincide with those of the other actors—or not. Scientists working in these museums displayed widely varying attitudes toward the gift that was often foisted upon them without their knowledge or consent. Once the gifts were publicized, the printed press determined much of the response to them by the final party: the public that came to see the eventual mounted dinosaur and voiced its own opinion, either explicitly (by visiting the museum) or implicitly (by allowing the dinosaur to become a part of their common frame of reference, in whichever form).

The attitudes of all these stakeholders to the donations differed according to their own interests (in both the material and idealistic sense). They interacted with each other and were influenced by reactions from either groups—or not. In the midst of these processes, Diplodocus functioned as a substrate, but a very specific one. To assess its significance, it is important to include all of these factors. The Diplodocus carnegii of this book, then, can only be a construction, a way of understanding smaller and larger groups of people making sense of their world and their professions. They are the paleontologists, museum directors and curators, artists, and kings—but also the public in its various guises. And one very rich man erecting, in the most literal sense, a temple to himself and his worldview.

To understand how the public perceived Diplodocus in the great natural history museums—but also as images endlessly repeated in print, photography, and film—it is useful to understand it as a meme: a cultural concept that is spread from person to person and gains reinforcement through transmission, retention, and repetition, eventually gaining universal acceptance as part of a common cultural framework. The term meme originates in 1976 with Richard Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene, where Dawkins describes it as the cultural variety of the gene (the biological unit of replication), with similar powers of self-perpetuation and mutation. It is important to emphasize that, for instance, a picture of a dinosaur is not a meme—but the idea of a dinosaur, with attached cultural meanings, can be.¹³ A general dinosaur idea is shared by the masses in order to understand not only life long gone but also the current world order. But the cogs of the dinosaur idea also turn in other, less obvious gears. It is seen to be a vehicle for cultural diplomacy and also as the arena in which conflicting scientific paradigms clashed. All these aspects—social, cultural, political, the museum, and the scientific context—construct the many faces of Diplodocus and its distinct agency in different discourses. The Diplodocus carnegii in this book thus constitutes a network of meanings and values, involving actors and practices that are sometimes closely connected and often worlds apart.

Scholarship has focused on the intense race to excavate large dinosaur fossils that took place in America and the (sometimes unscrupulous) competition between wealthy American museums and competitors. While critics acknowledge that a copy of Carnegie’s Diplodocus was the first dinosaur skeleton seen by millions of people in Europe, there has been little attention to the specifics of its European reception and appropriation. Many questions remain unanswered that this abstract and constructed Diplodocus can help us answer. What brought Carnegie to spend untold thousands in order to ply European heads of state with plaster dinosaurs? Where did it fit in with his patchwork of philanthropic enterprises? Biographers of Carnegie usually only mention the Diplodocus campaign in passing; within the wider framework of Carnegie’s philanthropic empire, that is probably justified. However, there was a definite purpose to the whole affair, and one that was frequently misunderstood even by the protagonists of this story.

Then our attention must be directed to the other side of the ocean: what made this animal and this cast so appealing to European audiences? And what happened to the public’s understanding of the history of life once one plaster dinosaur was followed by another, and then yet another, until no fewer than seven of Carnegie’s behemoths filled natural history museum halls on the continent?