Re: American Dinosaurs: Who and What Was First

[dml_moser@web.de]

It is astonishing to see that one of the oldest fossil dinosaur finds is not 
mentioned in the report by Thompson, and I fill in some details on that one: 

Some vertebrae and long bones were blasted out the rock in 1818 during the dig 
of a well in East Windsor, Connecticut, and were described by Prof. Nathan 
Smith 1820 in the American Journal of Science: "From their appearance", he 
wrote on the bone fragments, "it is possible that they are human bones." And he 
concluded: "Whether they are human or brute animal bones, it is an important 
fact as it relates to Geology". The human affinities were challenged 
immediately in a footnote by the editor of the Journal (Benjamin Silliman), who 
noted, that "The discovery of bones, in such a formation, so nearly allied to 
the primitive, cannot but be considered as very interesting. The bones were 
evidently those of a perfect and considerably large animal" and he cited 
several authorities who "all admitted _the possibility_ that they might be 
human bones, but did not consider the specimens as sufficiently distinct to 
form the basis of a certain conclusion." A local surgeon, Dr. Porter, who was 
present
 during the digging of the well, reported 1821 in the same Journal, that "the 
bones did not belong to a human body, but to some animal; and that the animal 
must have been about five feet in length. The _tail_ bone [sic] was easily 
discovered by its numerous articulations distinctly visible when the bones were 
first obtained; and by its being projected, in a curvilinean direction beyond 
the general mass." --  Afterwards it was recognized that these fragments 
belonged to a reptilian (Wyman 1855) and, most specifically, to a basal 
sauropodomorph dinosaur (see Galton 1976 and Yates 2002 for history and current 
determination). 
These and other American and non-American earliest dinosaur finds are discussed 
by Delair & Sarjeant 2002, Proc. Geologists Ass. 113: 185-197.

Kind regards

Markus Moser

------------------------
Dr. Markus Moser
Staatliches Museum fuer Naturkunde Stuttgart
Museum am Loewentor 
Rosenstein 1
D-70191 Stuttgart
Germany



> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: vrtpaleo@usc.edu
> Gesendet: 21.04.06 13:04:34
> An:  SVP" <vrtpaleo@usc.edu>
> Betreff: American Dinosaurs: Who and What Was First


> This is a recent article on historical paleontology by Dr. Keith Thompson, 
> formerly of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences and the Oxford 
> Museum of Natural History. (and the upcoming April DVPS Speaker) - Patti 
> Kane-Vanni
> 
> Published in American Scientist: 
> 
> Vist http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/50776 to 
> view the article with illustrations
> 
> 
> American Dinosaurs: Who and What Was First
> Who gets credit for the first dinosaur in North America depends on one's 
> definition of a description and a fossil
> Keith Stewart Thomson
> 
> In the year 2006 paleontologists will celebrate the 150th anniversary of
> the first description of a dinosaur fossil from North America. In March
> 1856 Joseph Leidy of Philadelphia wrote a brief paper describing and
> naming four kinds of 75-million-year-old reptilian teeth that had been
> discovered the previous year in the Cretaceous beds of the Judith River
> region of Montana. Without any of the media hoopla that accompanies many
> dinosaur discoveries today, he showed that two of the new reptiles were
> unquestionably dinosaurs, as judged from comparison with discoveries
> made in England 30 years before. These were the first American
> dinosaurs. (Leidy thought that the other two came from
> "lacertilians"--lizards--but they eventually turned out to be dinosaurs
> too.) Or perhaps they weren't. Who gets credit for the first North
> American dinosaur is a matter that depends on what constitutes a
> description, what counts as a fossil and whether its collector or
> describer knew what he had, and when.
> 
> 1824: Early English Dinosaurs
> 
> The first ever description of a dinosaur fossil had been by Robert Plot,
> first director of the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford in his Natural History
> of Oxford-shire of 1677. It was the distal end of a femur and had been
> found in the village of Cornwell in Oxfordshire. Plot gave an excellent
> drawing of the bone, but identified it as the thigh bone of a human
> giant. (Every paleontology student also knows that in 1772, the
> naturalist Richard Brookes turned Plot's figure upside down and, noting
> a startling resemblance to male genitalia, gave it its first formal
> name: Scrotum humanum . Probably because of this notoriety, the original
> specimen has long since disappeared.)
> 
> In 1824 William Buckland at Oxford, describing a suite of fossils from
> the nearby village of Stonesfield, gave Plot's creature the name
> Megalosaurus . Enough of it was preserved to show that Megalosaurus was
> a flesh-eating reptile some 40 feet long. Buckland's publication was the
> first modern, scientific description of dinosaur remains, even though
> he, not unreasonably, thought it was a giant lizard; the discrete
> category "dinosaur" was only defined by the British zoologist Richard
> Owen, first director of the Natural History Museum in London, in 1842.
> 
> Buckland had been obtaining Megalosaurus material from private
> collectors for at least a decade, and the existence and nature of his
> fossils were already well known in the scientific community. Unsure what
> the creature was, Buckland was finally pushed into publishing by the
> great French zoologist and paleontologist Georges Cuvier, who wanted to
> include the Oxfordshire monster in a new edition of his grand compendium
> Recherches sur les Ossemens Fossiles des Quadrupedes (1824).
> 
> Because of his vacillations, Buckland almost missed being first into
> print with a dinosaur (after Plot, that is). The accomplished amateur
> paleontologist Gideon Mantell had been busy collecting in the Tilgate
> Forest region of Sussex and had already mentioned his finds in his book
> Fossils of the South Downs (1822) as "the teeth, vertebrae, bones, and
> other remains of an animal of the lizard tribe of enormous magnitude."
> The same fossils were noted in The Gentleman's Magazine in 1823, and
> Cuvier included a reference to the teeth in his Ossemens Fossiles . But
> even Cuvier was not sure what Mantell's creature was; he thought the
> teeth might have been from a fish but "it is not impossible that they
> also came from a saurian, but a saurian even more extraordinary than all
> that we now know." Unable to obtain the imprimatur of Cuvier and perhaps
> due to Buckland's competitiveness, Mantell could not get a formal paper
> published on his discovery until early 1825. He identified his animal as
> a plant-eating reptile and named it Iguanodon (because of the
> resemblance of its teeth to those of a living iguana). Seven years
> later, Mantell described his second dinosaur: Hylaeosaurus , a somewhat
> smaller, spikey creature, also a herbivore.
> 
> 1856: The "First" American Dinosaur
> 
> As soon as Joseph Leidy received the Judith River fossils, he naturally
> compared them directly with the known European forms. From their teeth,
> the carnivorous form, Deinodon (now Albertosaurus ), appeared to be the
> equivalent of Megalosaurus, and the herbivore Trachodon , with
> leaf-shaped teeth, was clearly similar to Iguanodon .
> 
> Leidy, termed by his biographer Leonard Warren "the last man who knew
> everything," was a Philadelphia physician who had several careers in
> parallel: teacher, researcher, anatomist, microscopist, protozoologist,
> parasitologist (he discovered the nematode causing trichinosis)
> and--after the urging of the great British geologist Charles Lyell--a
> paleontologist. His first paper on fossil vertebrates established the
> existence of ancient horses in North America prior to their extinction
> sometime in the past two million years. The following year he received
> the first of a trickle--soon to become a flood--of new discoveries of
> fossil vertebrates from the "Bad Lands" (mauvaises terres a travailler ,
> as French trappers had put it) of the White River region of what is now
> South Dakota.
> 
> Leidy did not venture out west himself until 1872. For 25 years, he
> worked on specimens either sent to him by collectors or discovered by
> the remarkable explorer, surveyor and paleontologist Ferdinand Vandiveer
> Hayden, who was then right at the beginning of a distinguished and
> contentious career. Hayden graduated in 1850 from Oberlin College in
> Ohio and briefly taught school before getting a medical degree at Albany
> Medical College in Albany, New York. When the brilliant (if
> cantankerous) geologist James Hall, the state geologist for New York,
> decided that he wanted to send an expedition out to the White River Bad
> Lands, he chose two men to go: his assistant Fielding Bradford Meek (a
> specialist in invertebrates) and Hayden. This trip was the beginning of
> a longstanding, classic collaboration, out of which came much of our
> understanding of the stratigraphy and paleontology of the Upper Missouri
> region.
> 
> Hayden's fossils from the 1853 expedition sponsored by Hall found their
> way to Leidy to describe. From that time, although lacking any prospect
> of further employment, Hayden was sure of his vocation. In letters to
> Spencer Baird, assistant secretary of the new Smithsonian Institution,
> he wrote: "I could endure cheerfully any amount of toil, hardship, and
> self denial ... to labour in the field as a naturalist. I could live as
> the wild Indian lives ... without a murmur ?. My love for natural
> History is so great that I hardly feel any disposition for anything
> else."
> 
>  Hayden cast about for sponsors for a second trip. He offered to collect
> for Leidy and the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, but they
> were too cautious. Finally, he settled for this second-best choice: two
> years of collecting for Colonel Alfred Vaughn, the Indian Agent at St.
> Louis, with the fossils to be split between them. This time Hayden
> traveled through much of the Upper Missouri country either alone or with
> men from the American Fur Company. When they saw what he had brought
> back, Leidy and the Academy turned out to be willing to pay for his
> fossils because included in that collection were the teeth that he had
> picked up from near the confluence of the Judith River and the Missouri.
> 
> 1836: The Footprints of "Giant Birds"
> 
> The reason that one might hesitate to record Leidy's fossils as the
> first American dinosaurs is that, 20 years previously, the Reverend
> Edward Hitchchock, president of Amherst College, had described dinosaur
> trackways from the sandstone of the Connecticut River Valley. Such foot
> prints had first been noticed in 1802 by a boy named Pliny Moody on his
> father's farm at South Hadley, Massachusetts. In early 1836, two local
> men found more tracks at a quarry near Montague, Massachusetts, and drew
> them to the attention of a doctor James Dean and the Reverend Hitchcock;
> the two later squabbled about who had "first scientifically investigated
> and described the fossil footmarks of the Connecticut valley."
> 
> The trackways that Hitchcock described in a long article in the American
> Journal of Science in 1836 were of 11 kinds, all made, he concluded, by
> giant three-toed birds that he termed Ornithichnites . By 1858
> Hitchcock, having scoured the pits where the Late Triassic red sandstone
> was quarried for building and "flagging" stones, had raised the total to
> 70. These putatively included traces from marsupials, lizards, frogs,
> chelonians (turtles) and invertebrates, as well as "birds." In so doing,
> he founded the new science of ichnology--the study of footprints.
> 
> The principal argument against recognizing Hitchcock as the first to
> record North American dinosaur fossils is not that he thought they had
> been made by birds, but that they were only impressions made by
> dinosaurs, not bony, bodily remnants of dinosaurs. If a fossil is
> anything "dug up" (Latin: fossilis ), then Hitchcock gets the palm, but
> only for the first "trace fossils." For real fossil remains, Leidy is
> the winner.
> 
> 1787: What Constitutes a Description?
> 
> But Leidy is still only the first by default. As early as 1787, the
> Philadelphia merchant Timothy Matlack and the distinguished physician
> and anatomist Caspar Wistar read before a meeting of the American
> Philosophical Society an account of "A large thigh bone found near
> Woodbury Creek in Glocester County, N.J." The creek runs not far from
> where, 70 years later, the first associated remains of any dinosaur were
> excavated and described by Leidy as Hadrosaurus --another herbivore like
> Iguanodon . The Minutes of the October 5, 1787 meeting of the Society
> record only the subject of the presentation and the admonition that the
> authors, with a Dr. John Rodgers, were "to search for the missing part
> of the skeleton." Unfortunately, no copy of their manuscript exists, nor
> is there any information about whether further collecting was attempted.
> Even the specimen itself is missing, but we can be reasonably sure that
> this femur was the first discovery of an American dinosaur. It would be
> nice to think that the bone still exists in someone's attic.
> 
> ---------------------Article Ends----------------------------
> 
> Copyright (c) 2003, Sigma Xi
>