Q&A: “Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle -- A Virtual Discussion with Lukas Rieppel”

Select answers from Lukas Rieppel (LR), author of Assembling the Dinosaur: Fossil Hunters, Tycoons and the Making of a Spectacle

Question: On the list of founders for the American Museum of Natural History was a Benjamin H. Field. Was he affiliated with Chicago's Field Museum? (Mary Anne Eves)

LR: Benjamin Field was a prominent merchant and philanthropist in late-19th century New York. The Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago was named after the department store magnate, Marshall Field, who donated one million dollars towards the museum's founding.

Question: Hi Lukas! I’d love to hear you talk more about how questions of gender play out in this narrative—is the history of dinosaurs in the Golden Age an inherently “masculine” story? If so, why? How is this related to the current American phenomenon of paleontology as an attractive science to boys but not necessarily to girls? (It’s easy to see how this plays out when you’re walking through the dinosaur halls amidst school groups at the AMNH.) (Elaine Ayers)

LR: You are right: gender is a big part of the story! This is true on a couple of different levels. For one, the practice of paleontology was itself very gendered. As a scientific endeavor, it depended heavily on outdoor activities, such as field work, that functioned as a performance of what were traditionally seen as masculine qualities like strength, courage, resilience, and virility. Of course, that does not mean there were no women who made contributions to paleontology, as the example of Mary Anning and others help demonstrate. Women played an important role in camp life as well. (See my response to Jessica Linker below.) Still, the overwhelming majority of paleontologists were male, and they understood their scientific activities to be a distinctly masculine pursuit. That is now starting to change, but not fast enough! Second, dinosaurs themselves were often gendered male, even though it is exceedingly difficult (often impossible) to determine the sexual dimorphism of these creatures based on the scant fossil evidence they leave behind. This is part of the story about how and why dinosaurs were so consistently depicted as intensely competitive creatures. That, too, has changed dramatically in recent years, largely as a result of the emerging consensus that dinosaurs were the extinct ancestors of modern birds.

Question: In this period, how did they think about extinction and more specifically, what were the common explanations for the dinosaurs’ demise? (Patrick Spero)

LR: This is a huge, important, and fascinating question! The late 19th and early 20th century was a period in which many biologists engaged in a heated debate about the theory of evolution and the fact of extinction. In fact, vertebrate paleontologists from the United States such as Edward Drinker Cope and his protégé, Henry Fairfield Osborn, were at the forefront of these debates. Drawing on the evolutionary ideas of a French naturalist named Jean Baptiste de Lamarck, most paleontologists at this time rejected the centrality of natural selection acting on random variation in the evolutionary process. Instead, paleontologists such as Cope analogized the evolution of entire species to the development of individual organisms. This is before the discovery of DNA, and it was widely believed that individual organisms are compelled by some internal drive or mysterious substance to grow more complex and functionally integrated over their lifetime. Judging from the fossil record, the same thing appeared to be true of entire lineages as well. So just as individual metazoan organisms develop from a single fertilized egg into a complex multicellular adult made up of many diverse tissue types that are seamlessly integrated into a functioning whole, so too did humans evolve out of single-celled ancestors into our complex, multicellular selves. But the process of individual development does not stop at adulthood. Rather, it ends with senescence and, eventually, death. According to paleontologists such as Cope, extinction was just the death of a whole species, the natural end of its evolutionary life cycle. Moreover, in much the same way that individual humans often become less adaptive and flexible as we enter old age, it was believed that entire species suffer the same fate, which made it impossible for them to keep up as environmental conditions and ecological relationships changed over geological time. Interestingly, dinosaurs were a favorite example of such an evolutionary dead end, a lineage that had outlived its usefulness and was destined to die a natural death, thereby opening up the ecological space for younger, nimbler, and more adaptable mammals to evolve.

Question: Thank you, Lukas, for this very interesting and important presentation and work. I really appreciated your attention to the typically less appreciated “independent fossil hunters” whose labor made possible the excavation and movement of the bones to spaces of exhibition in the United States. I am wondering if you could speak to colonial or imperial context of this story? Did, for example, these white fossil hunters, philanthropists, or naturalists from the U.S. depend on Indigenous knowledge or technology to locate and extract these bones, or to access the land in which they were embedded? Did they encounter resistance by Indigenous nations to their removal? Thank you so much for any and all insight on this! (Gustave Lester)

LR: Another excellent question. The short answer is "yes"! Dinosaur paleontology was deeply tied up with the history of American imperialism. You mention one of these entanglements in your question. It is often said that dinosaurs were discovered in the American West during the late 19th century, as white settlers colonized this region, largely in search of mineral wealth. But people lived in these parts of the North American interior long before the United States had come into being, and there is ample evidence that Indigenous tribes such as the Lakota took a strong interest in the fossil bones of strange-looking creatures that littered this region. If you are interested in this history, I would recommend the work of Adrianne Mayor, who has traced the way that vertebrate fossils helped to inform and inspire a range of Native American origin stories, much as they have also informed scientific accounts of the history of life on earth. As a result, American paleontologists such as Edward Drinker Cope and Otheniel Charles Marsh often relied on Native American guides and informants like the famous Lakota Chief Red Cloud to provide information about the location of these wonderful and mysterious objects. You are also right about resistance from Indigenous tribes, who often (correctly, as it turns out) suspected that white explorers who claimed only to be interested in esoteric knowledge were also tasked with helping to develop the extractive economy taking shape in the American West at the time, which directly contributed to the dispossession of Native American tribes. An argument can therefore be made that, in addition to being dispossessed of their ancestral homelands and traditional hunting grounds, Native American tribes like the Lakota were also robbed of their pre-history, as origin stories that sought to explain the abundant fossils one could find in places such as the Black Hills were refigured as scientific accounts of how life evolved over time. I'll stop there, because this response is getting too long already. But I want to note, quickly, that vertebrate paleontology was implicated in other expressions of American imperialism as well. For example, prominent paleontologists such as Barnum Brown frequently consulted for petroleum companies, often conducting clandestine intelligence-gathering expeditions on their behalf in places like Cuba, Ethiopia, and Mongolia under the guise of merely looking for dinosaur bones.

Question: This really isn't a question, but there are plenty of women engaged with science in the nineteenth century -- but consider the source. Re: interest in dinosaurs, Graceanna Lewis has a longstanding interest in tracing the evolution of dinosaurs from birds and was lecturing about this in the latter half of the nineteenth century! (Jessica Linker)

LR: Yes, absolutely! While the practice of paleontology was traditionally understood as a masculine pursuit, that does not mean women did not make significant and foundational contributions to our knowledge about the deep past. Thank you for mentioning Graceanna Lewis -- I'd love to learn more about her! It sounds like you are working on this history, and I can't wait to read your contributions to this important conversation. And of course, there are many other examples as well. I mentioned the most famous one, Mary Anning, above. Let me add another example: Marion Brown. She was the first wife of Barnum Brown, who is perhaps the most famous dinosaur hunter of all time. There is a fascinating correspondence between her and her husband that deserves more attention. Barnum Brown also had an interesting dispute with his boss at the American Museum, Henry Fairfield Osborn, who insisted that women had no place in the field. Marion loved the outdoors and was passionate about fossil hunting, and there is good evidence that she made a lot of contributions to paleontology which have gone almost entirely uncredited. Barnum Brown's second wife, Lilian, is a fascinating case also. She wrote many popular books about her adventures all over the world. Finally, let me plug the work of Jenna Tonn here, who has done fascinating research about family dynamics in natural history. I think Marion and Lilian Brown's cases, among many others, are a perfect example of all the invisible labor that is required but often goes unacknowledged in natural history.

Question: Hi all! Thanks so much for the great talk :) My question is how the 19th century conversation around paleontology differs or is similar to the 18th century trans-Atlantic conversations that French naturalists (like Buffon) were having with Americans (like Thomas Jefferson). Do we have any correspondences that link paleontology and nation-building in the U.S.? (Ariana Potichnyj)

LR: Again, the short answer is yes! In my remarks during the online conversation, I mentioned the example of Diplodocus carnegii. I have an entire chapter in my book that uses Andrew Carnegie to make more or less exactly this point. There is also a whole book about the Carnegie dinosaur, American Dinosaur Abroad by Iljia Nieuwland, which you might be interested in checking out. But of course you are right that there were differences too. The most important one, I would say, is that dinosaurs were believed to have gone extinct at the end of the Cretaceous period. Their extinction allowed more intelligent mammals, such as the Mastodon, to evolve. So the relationship between the U.S. and dinosaurs was more complex and ambivalent than in the case of the Mastodon in some ways. While dinosaurs were celebrated as an expression of American exceptionalism, an object lesson in the awesome power and fecundity of the United States, dinosaurs also served as a cautionary tale, illustrating the theory of "racial senescence" that I described in my response to Patrick Spero above.

Question: How were schoolchildren taught about dinosaurs in the late 19th century and do you see connections between capitalism and paleontology exhibited in these educational materials? (Lauren Killingsworth)

LR: During the 19th century, museums were understood as educational institutions. (The phrase that was often used at the time was "rational recreation.") This frequently brought them into contact with schools. The American Museum of Natural History, for example, secured funding from the New York municipal government by partnering with the public school system. This museum hosted evening lectures for NY schoolteachers, invited classes into its exhibition halls, and created a number of "traveling exhibits" that toured all five boroughs to visit individual public schools. And dinosaurs certainly featured in all of these outreach programs, because they were so immensely popular. However, in my research, I was surprised to discover that dinosaurs were not especially connected to children at this time. The strong association between a fascination with dinosaurs and childhood only seems to have truly emerged after the Second World War. I have some ideas about why that might be, having to do with the way dinosaurs were taken up by mass media companies like Disney, but I'm still not satisfied that I fully understand how this transition took place. I'm hoping a post-war historian might be enticed to take up the question and provide a more solid answer!

Question: Thank you so much for this interesting program! I was aware that wealthy capitalists and industrialists like J.P. Morgan and Andrew Carnegie funded many of the early discoveries of dinosaurs and purchased fossils for donations to local museums.  Are some members of today's wealthy elite doing the same thing? (Daniel Bornstein)

LR: Very much so. To cite just a single example, the recently renovated dinosaur exhibit at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC is called the "David H. Koch Hall of Fossils -- Deep Time." There's a lot to be said about that, especially since the late David Koch and his brother Charles also donated huge sums of money to sow doubt and promote skepticism about anthropogenic climate change. You might be interested in a short op-ed that I wrote on this topic a few months ago.

Question: My impression of the early historical interpretation of dinosaurs is that they were very influenced by contemporary understandings of reptiles--this was of course long before we understood (some) dinosaurs as possibly warm-blooded, sometimes feathered proto-birds. The contrast between portrayals of dinosaurs and extinct mammals as, on the one hand, solitary and predatory and, on the other hand, social and cooperative seems influenced by what was known about modern animals as much as by capitalism, social Darwinism, and the like. How do you balance this "simple" natural history account with more sociological/cultural explanations? (Jesse Hochstadt)

LR: Another excellent question. And a hard one at that! As I read it, this question goes beyond the particular case of dinosaurs. It's really a question about the relationship between science and its larger social, cultural, and economic context. You are completely correct to point out that dinosaurs are reptiles. The modern understanding is that dinosaurs are part of a lineage called "archosaurs," and their closest living relatives are crocodiles. Birds are nested within the dinosaur family tree, meaning that dinosaurs did not go extinct. If anything, they are thriving! But during the late 19th and early 20th century, the evolutionary history of birds was a big mystery, and their relationship to dinosaurs was very controversial. This is true despite the fact that "Darwin's bulldog," Thomas Henry Huxley, had theorized that dinosaurs might constitute a missing link between reptiles and birds as early as 1868. So it's true that dinosaurs were usually analogized to reptiles rather than birds at the time, and it's completely fair to point out that many reptiles are solitary predators. Still, the question remains: why model the functional anatomy and behavioral ecology of dinosaurs on something like the monitor lizard rather than another type of organism? For example, Richard Owen thought that dinosaurs inhabited the same ecological niche as modern pachyderms do, and hence the Crystal Palace dinosaurs sculpted by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins have a very mammalian body plan. Later paleontologists like Joseph Leidy modeled American dinosaurs like Hadrosaurus on the kangaroo, because of its relatively diminutive forelimbs coupled with much bigger hind legs and a powerful tail. Now we tend to imagine dinosaurs as bird-like creatures. Moreover, even early 20th century paleontologists such as Osborn did not model their dinosaurs on reptiles in every respect. The functional anatomy of long-necked and plant-eating sauropod dinosaurs such as the Brontosaurus or Diplodocus, for example, featured strong columnar legs that extend straight out under the animal's body. A number of German paleontologists objected to this pose because it was insufficiently reptilian, preferring to mount their dinosaurs with the legs splayed out to the side and bent in a 90 degree angle, dragging their bellies on the ground like many lizards now do. Anyway, that's all to say that we've got something of a chicken or the egg problem here. Were dinosaurs understood as solitary brutes because they were modeled on reptiles, or were they modeled on reptiles because they were understood as ferocious tyrants of the prehistoric? I personally prefer to evade the issue altogether by saying that both went hand in hand. For me, it's less important to specify which way the causal arrow goes. Instead, I try to assemble a kind of picture of gestalt of what might be described as the scientific culture that prevailed at the time, one that tries to integrate technical knowledge with social and economic factors, suggesting that all of these mutually reinforced one another.

Question: Do zoos serve the same purpose? (Bill Mancuso)

LR: Yes, zoos have a very similar history, and many of the same people who created these natural history museums also served on the board of trustees of zoos. There are some great books if you are interested in this topic. A good place to start would be Elizabeth Hanson's book, Animal Attractions: Nature on Display in American Zoos, as well as Nigel Rothfels' book, Savages and Beasts: The Birth of the Modern Zoo. But there are many more, including ones that touch on zoos in other time periods and different parts of the world.