The related text is Home of the Lost World: Dinosaurs, Dynasties and Life Stories on Earth.
There is even a 7,350-pound bronze dragon on the sidewalk in front of the store, which is located in this red brick Gothic revival building on the outskirts of downtown New Haven. It was Peabody who led the great era of paleontological discovery in the19th century. It also launched the modern dinosaur revival movement in the late 1960s, which set off a global dinosaur tide and inspired the franchise of Jurassic Park. Peabody researchers continue to make breakthroughs. In 20 10, they first determined the exact color of the whole dinosaur, one by one. Unfortunately, Huxley is still in China where it was found: it looks like a cross between a Las Vegas showgirl and a hamburger chicken. In addition, Peabody has one of the most respected images in all paleontology: The Reptile Age by Rudolf Salinger is a mural of 1 10 feet, depicting dinosaurs and other life forms in the panorama of the earth's history over the past 362 million years, which led a writer to call the museum "Sistine Evolution Church".
So besides dinosaurs, why on earth? One answer is that most tourists miss the discovery of fossils of mammals and birds, but Charles Darwin himself thinks this is the best evidence of evolution in his lifetime.
These discoveries are largely the work of othniel charles marsh, a talented and competitive paleontologist at Yale University. Although Marsh grew up in a poor agricultural family in upstate New York, he was the nephew of george peabody, george peabody was a commercial banker in London in the mid-Kloc-0/9th century, and he was also the promoter of everything in the United States. Peabody made a lot of money from scratch, and then donated most of it in his lifetime, focusing on the formal education he lacked. Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History is one of the achievements. It was founded in 1866 at the urging of its nephew, and is currently celebrating the 50th anniversary of/kloc-0. Peabody's wealth also enabled Marsh to lead a series of four pioneering Yale expeditions in the early 1970s of 19, crossing the new transcontinental railway and exploring the western United States on horseback.
Now you can subscribe to Smithsonian magazine for only 12 dollars. This story is selected from the April issue of Smithsonian magazine. At first, people paid attention not to dinosaurs, but to a popular and scientifically interesting creature: horses. Thomas Henry Huxley, a British paleontologist, was nicknamed "Darwin's bulldog" for advocating the theory of evolution. He used fossils to trace horses back to Europe 60 million years ago. But Marsh and his team at Yale University are accumulating a rich fossil record. He thinks this horse evolved in North America. Huxley was very interested, so 1876 visited Yale University, hoping to find evidence for himself. The two men spent most of August looking for fossils in "hard work".
This is a revelation: Huxley will ask to see a specimen to illustrate some viewpoints of horse evolution. As Leonard, Huxley's son and biographer, said later, "Professor Marsh will only turn to his assistant and let him take the box number" until Huxley finally exclaimed, "I believe you are a magician; Whatever I want, you just have to make it magical. "
Huxley became a ready-made convert to Marsh's argument about the evolution of North American horses. At his request, Marsh pieced together a famous but not particularly striking example. You can see it now in a showcase in Peabody's Mammal Museum, right in front of the dinosaurs. This is a series of different leg bones and molars, the third American species. They show that the size of the horse is increasing. It evolved 50 million years ago, from Oro Heaps with four toes on the front leg to a modern horse with only one hoof. The development of evolution makes it run hard, even in flat grasslands and deserts.
In September, Huxley showed this chart in a speech in new york and outlined the story of North America. He believes that Marsh has discovered enough about horses. "This proves the truth of the hypothesis of evolution", as The New York Times said, "This is a truth that cannot be shaken by the proposition of incidental problems." Huxley also predicted that more primitive horses would eventually have a fifth toe. He and Marsh discussed this theoretical "dawn horse", which is called Eohippus. One night in New Haven, Huxley drew a strange five-toed horse. Then he drew an equally strange primitive man with a pencil, riding a horse naked. Marsh developed like a whirlpool and added a title "Eohippus &；; Eohomo "is like a horse and a cowboy walking in the ancient sunrise in the western United States." A few days after visiting Peabody, Huxley wrote down what he saw and heard in Peabody. He said, "There is no existing vertebrate fossil to compare with it." After working with O.C. Marsh all day, Thomas Henry Huxley described an imaginary "Dawn Man" riding the same imaginary "Dawn Horse". (robert lorenz/Yale Peabody Museum) This box contains the hip bones of the hadrosaurs. Oscar Hager shipped it to Yale at 1892, and then left here to work for O.C. Marsh's competitors. (Robert Lorenz/Peabody Museum, Yale) Oscar Hager 1869 made these notes while studying under the guidance of Eddison Emory Verrill, the first professor of zoology at Yale University. (Robert Lorenz/Peabody Museum, Yale) The radius of stegosaurus' left forelimb. O. Marsh described and named this dinosaur according to the fossils collected in Wyoming. Whether the animal's spikes are upward or more horizontal is still the focus of debate. (Peabody Museum, Robert Lorenz/Yale University) In the collection of the museum, there are Deborah specimens from Zhang Lan and blood vessels of plants collected by Osborne Botanical Laboratory. (Peabody Museum, Robert Lorenz/Yale University) The only known species of Agkistrodon in New England (Peabody Museum, Robert Lorenz/Yale University)/Kloc-an anchovy coral (Peabody Museum, Robert Lorenz/Yale University) collected in the mid-7th century, a recently collected black fin ice fish, due to lack of red blood cells,
It caught Darwin's attention, but it was not so much a horse as a pair of birds in the late Cretaceous. 65438+In the early 1970s, Marsh successfully obtained two spectacular bird fossils from sediments 80 million years ago in the smoky hilly area of north-central Kansas: Hasburnes and Ishittennis. These specimens have heads, unlike the only archaeopteryx specimens known at that time, which have obvious reptile teeth and can catch fish underwater.
This discovery, Marsh successfully announced that in a monograph on toothed birds in North America, he correctly predicted that Archaeopteryx would also have teeth. 1880, a reporter was transferred to the book swamp. "Your research on these ancient birds and many fossil animals in North America has provided the best support for the theory of evolution, which appeared in the past 20 years"-that is, since the publication of the Origin of Species. The signature of this letter is "Sincere thanks, believe me, your sincerity, Charles Darwin."
Haitz Palmer, Ronnies and Isis now occupy an inconspicuous showcase next to the Great Hall of Dinosaurs, which is hidden by a 70-foot-long bronze dragon boulder nearby and a huge mural overhead. But they are worth seeing. Why? Marsh finally published a monograph on toothed birds through the US Geological Survey (USGS). A long time later, in the 1990s of 19, a congressman gave a copy of this book as an example of taxpayers spending money on "atheistic garbage". He repeated incredulously, "Birds with teeth, birds with teeth!" ! -It helped push the Congress to attack the USGS, at that time, USGS believed that scientific mapping of water supply should shape settlements in the west. Congress quickly cut USGS funding and overturned its warning that messy solutions would produce a "legacy of water rights conflicts and lawsuits." In the arid western United States, people are fighting for water and can still feel the bite of those "toothed birds". In addition to the guards, there is only a wooden stool, and a dozen giant dinosaurs are displayed in the room. Lei Long occupied the whole scene, so it's easy to understand why Marsh named it "Lei Lizard". 1877 One day in March, two friends with scientific minds discovered such a huge dinosaur while hiking. Morrison, Colorado, suddenly found herself quietly staring at the huge vertebrate fossils embedded in the stone. One of them wrote in his diary: "This is really terrible, completely beyond anything I have read or imagined. I can't believe my eyes. "
Marsh has retired from field work, but he used his inherited wealth to deploy collectors he hired. He also had a fierce competition with edward drinker cope of the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences, which is now called "Bone War". Marsh managed to squeeze out this huge new specimen and named it Titan (later Atlantis Dragon).
In the same year, Marsh's collectors also discovered and transported to him the carnivorous Jurassic monster Allosaurus and herbivores Apatite Dragon and Stegosaurus. Visitors to museums today can easily stare at the huge stegosaurus weighing 5 tons when they are alive and notice that its skull seems too small to hold enough brains. Marsh thinks so, too, and speculates that there must be a second brain in a large hollow area of the lower vertebra of Stegosaurus. His Stegosaurus has always been regarded as the source of inspiration for a famous light poem in Chicago Tribune in 1903, including:
Living things have two sets of brains,
A set on his head (old place),
The other is at the base of his spine.
So he can reason a priori.
There is also a posteriori.
Although many popular books still associate this poem with Stegosaurus, this connection is wrong. In fact, one of Marsh's former students just borrowed the idea of his two brains and filmed it on a completely different dinosaur brachiosaurus at the Field Museum in Chicago. It was Brachiosaurus that inspired this poem. But at least let us believe that stegosaurus helps. It is also commendable that it has only one brain, which a modern paleontologist described as "bending the size and shape of a hot dog".
Nine swamp dinosaurs appeared in the mural overhead, while only three appeared in the mural of Cope (ancient competition is hard to die out). The artist Rudolph Zaringer (Rudolph Zaringer) 1942 was 23 years old at first, but later he admitted that he didn't know "the front and rear ends of dinosaurs". He spent four years on this project, and an art historian said that the resulting dinosaur Eden was the most important mural since15th century. 1953, Life magazine published a reprint of the original mural, with detailed information about dragons and stegosaurus on the cover. This mural inspired a generation of future paleontologists. This also caught the attention of a filmmaker in Tokyo. He borrowed many dinosaurs from Salinger to make a new monster Godzilla.
Murals in the Reptile Age (Peabody Museum, Robert Lorenz/Yale University) M) Salinger's murals incorporated the dogma from O.C. Marsh and other places at that time, that is, dinosaurs dragged their tailors along. But in 1964, a discovery by museum paleontologist John Ostrom broke this stereotype. He and an assistant went for a walk in Bridge, Montana, at the end of the busy farming season that year, and found something that looked like a hand. A huge paw was eroding from the rock slope. In fact, it is a foot, and it sticks out a sickle-shaped claw of nearly five inches from the innermost toe, and finally gives this species the name "terrible claw". In the next few years, when Ostrom studied his findings, he began to think, instead of being slow and stupid. Danon Ichus "must be an agile, highly carnivorous, extremely agile and very active animal, sensitive to many * * * and quick to respond." He boldly put forward this idea before 1969 North American Paleontology Congress. He claimed that there was evidence that many dinosaurs "had the characteristics of the metabolic level of mammals or birds". According to paleontologist robert baker, the idea caused a "scream of fear" among traditionalists in the audience. He is an undergraduate student of Ostrom at Yale University and continues to promote this new view of dinosaurs. This is the beginning of the revival of modern dinosaurs.
The next year, ostriches began to compare many similarities between Denon ychus and Archaeopteryx (an ancient bird). From this point of view, he then published a series of groundbreaking papers, proving that biped dinosaurs including Dino nikos were actually the ancestors of modern birds. This idea is so common now that researchers debate why birds are the only dinosaurs that survived the extinction 66 million years ago.
Novelist Michael Christon later spent time interviewing ostriches in person and by telephone, paying special attention to Dino nikos's ability. Later, he apologetically told Ostrom that his book Jurassic Park would be replaced by a raptor related to Dino nikos, because the name sounded "more dramatic". However, visitors to Peabody Museum can still see the original model of Dino nikos, whose arms and legs are swinging back and forth, elbows are bent and claws are open. In a recent interview, a former graduate student of Ostrom University pointed out an interesting similarity: if you swing those outstretched arms back a little (after some small evolutionary adaptation), the hand-holding posture becomes the beat of a bird's wing, and its installation drawing 193 1 shows the bones on which this iconic name is based. It is actually a hybrid of two different animals: at that time, its head came from a related but different Kamalesas. (Yale Peabody Museum Archives)
The museum is currently raising funds to greatly update the dinosaur museum and the mammal museum. (Lei Long will stop dragging its tail and Stegosaurus will fight Allosaurus) But it is worth visiting now, because outdated exhibitions and the reconstruction of dinosaurs have somehow aroused another era of paleontology.
When you look at another fossil that most tourists skip, it is a whole. 45 million years ago, it lived at the junction of Utah and Wyoming. It looks like a rhinoceros, but it has canine teeth like saber teeth and three sets of knobs like giraffe heads, extending from its nose to the top of its strange flat head.
This is one of the first reconstruction works approved by O.C. Marsh to be exhibited in the museum. Marsh usually only likes to reconstruct fossil animals on paper and safely store actual bones for research. So he nervously ordered his preparers to make a whole out of paper. Due to the size of fibers, this requires paper to have a high fiber content.