Dinosaurs

Dinosaurs, by William Diller Matthew

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Title: Dinosaurs With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections
Author: William Diller Matthew

Release Date: September 16, 2006 [eBook #19302]
Language: English
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DINOSAURS
With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections
by
W. D. MATTHEW
Curator of Vertebrate Pal?ontology

... 'Dragons of the prime That tare each other in their slime'
[Illustration: SKULL OF THE GREAT CARNIVOROUS DINOSAUR TYRANNOSAURUS IN THE AMERICAN MUSEUM.]
New York American Museum of Natural History 1915

DINOSAURS.
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
The Age of Reptiles. Its Antiquity, Duration and Significance in Geological History. 9
CHAPTER II.
North America in the Age of Reptiles. Its Geographic and Climatic Changes. 16
CHAPTER III.
Kinds of Dinosaurs. Common Characters and Differences between the various Groups. Classification. 25
CHAPTER IV.
The Carnivorous Dinosaurs--Allosaurus, Tyrannosaurus, Ornitholestes, etc. 33
CHAPTER V.
The Amphibious Dinosaurs--Brontosaurus, Diplodocus, etc. 60
CHAPTER VI.
The Beaked Dinosaurs. The Iguanodonts--Iguanodon, Camptosaurus. 75
CHAPTER VII.
The Beaked Dinosaurs (continued). The Duckbilled Dinosaurs--Trachodon, Saurolophus. 82
CHAPTER VIII.
The Beaked Dinosaurs (continued). The Armored Dinosaurs--Stegosaurus, Ankylosaurus. 101
CHAPTER IX.
The Beaked Dinosaurs (concluded). The Horned Dinosaurs--Triceratops, etc. 107
CHAPTER X.
Geographical Distribution of Dinosaurs. 114
CHAPTER XI.
Collecting Dinosaurs. How and Where they are Found. The First Discovery of Dinosaurs in the West. The Bone-Cabin Quarry. Fossil Hunting by Boat in Canada. 116

PREFACE.
This volume is in large part a reprint of various popular descriptions and notices in the American Museum Journal and elsewhere by Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, Mr. Barnum Brown, and the writer. There has been a considerable demand for these articles which are now mostly out of print. In reprinting it seemed best to combine and supplement them so as to make a consecutive and intelligible account of the Dinosaur collections in the Museum. The original notices are quoted verbatim; for the remainder of the text the present writer is responsible. Professor S.W. Williston of Chicago University has kindly contributed a chapter--all too brief--describing the first discoveries of dinosaurs in the Western formations that have since yielded so large a harvest.
The photographs of American Museum specimens are by Mr. A.E. Anderson; the field photographs by various Museum expeditions; the restorations by Mr. Charles R. Knight. Most of these illustrations have been published elsewhere by Professor Osborn, Mr. Brown and others. The diagrams, figs. 1-9, 24, 25, 37 and 40, are my own.
W. D. M.
CHAPTER I.
THE AGE OF REPTILES.
ITS ANTIQUITY, DURATION AND SIGNIFICANCE IN GEOLOGIC HISTORY.
Pal?ontology deals with the History of Life. Its time is measured in geologic epochs and periods, in millions of years instead of centuries. Man, by this measure, is but a creature of yesterday--his "forty centuries of civilization"[1] but a passing episode. It is by no means easy for us to adjust our perspective to the immensely long spaces of time involved in geological evolution. We are apt to think of all these extinct animals merely as prehistoric--to imagine them all living at the same time and contending with our cave-dwelling ancestors for the mastery of the earth.
In order to understand the place of the Dinosaurs in world-history, we must first get some idea of the length of geologic periods and the immense space of time separating one extinct fauna from another.
The Age of Man. Prehistoric time, as it is commonly understood, is the time when barbaric and savage tribes of men inhabited the world but before civilization began, and earlier than the written records on which history is based. This corresponds roughly to the Pleistocene epoch of geology; it is included along with the much shorter time during which civilization has existed, in the latest and shortest of the geological periods, the Quaternary. It was the age of the mammoth and the mastodon, the megatherium and Irish deer and of other quadrupeds large and small which are now extinct; but most of its animals were the same species as now exist. It was marked by the great episode of the Ice Age, when considerable parts of the earth's surface were buried under immense accumulations of ice, remnants of which are still with us