Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History
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Dinosaurs in the Attic: An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History
256eBook
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466871878 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | St. Martin's Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 256 |
| Sales rank: | 255,085 |
| File size: | 437 KB |
About the Author
Douglas Preston is the co-author with Lincoln Child of the celebrated Pendergast series of novels, including such best-selling titles as Fever Dream, The Book of the Dead, The Wheel of Darkness, and Relic, which became a number one box office hit movie. His solo novels include the New York Times bestsellers Impact, Blasphemy, The Codex, and Tyrannosaur Canyon. His most recent nonfiction book, The Monster of Florence, is being made into a film starring George Clooney. Preston is an expert long-distance horseman, a member of the elite Long Riders Guild, and a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society. He has travelled to remote parts of the world as an archaeological correspondent for The New Yorker. He also worked as an editor and writer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and taught nonfiction writing at Princeton University. Preston is the Co-president of International Thriller Writers, and serves on the Governing Council of the Authors Guild.
Place of Birth:
Cambridge, MassachusettsEducation:
B.A., Pomona College, 1978Website:
http://www.prestonchild.comRead an Excerpt
Dinosaurs in the Attic
An Excursion into the American Museum of Natural History
By Douglas J. Preston
St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1986 Douglas J. PrestonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-7187-8
CHAPTER 1
The Museums That Almost Were
Abandoned and forgotten in the southern portion of New York's Central Park, not far from Tavern on the Green, lie buried giant, broken molds of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. These molds are all that remain of an extravagant plan to create a huge Paleozoic Museum and outdoor exhibit in Central Park. Modeled after Sydenham Palace, a large glass building and park outside London, the museum was to have exhibited "specimens of animals of the pre-Adamite period," including dinosaurs, extinct mosasaurs and mastodons, giant sloths, and Irish elk. The foundation for this museum was actually excavated in the southwest corner of the park, opposite 63rd Street. It remains there to this day, covered with earth.
This was just one of many failed attempts to found a natural history museum in New York City. In the mid-nineteenth century, New York was rapidly becoming the financial center of the country, and many New Yorkers were amassing fortunes from railroads, banking, and other businesses during the expansion that followed the Civil War. These nouveaux riches were embarrassed by the conspicuous lack of cultural institutions in New York City. Most of the great cities of Europe boasted large natural history museums or "royal cabinets," as did many cities in America. Philadelphia had established the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1812, which was followed by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Boston Society of Natural History. Louis Agassiz' Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, founded in 1859, was already renowned as the center of scientific learning in the United States. Men of science in Boston and Philadelphia scornfully dismissed New York as merely a center of crass commercialism, incapable of producing a museum of note.
There probably was some truth to this. During the first half of the nineteenth century, lack of interest killed most efforts to build a natural history museum in New York. Those efforts that did materialize were little more than miscellaneous collections of curiosities.
One of the first museums in New York to be completed was Delacourte's Cabinet of Natural History, founded in 1804. Delacourte's museum was typical of the so-called "cabinets of curiosities" prevalent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its published catalog listed the "Natural Productions and Curiosities which Compose the Collections of the Cabinet" (a rather motley assortment, as it turned out). In the catalog, Delacourte complained: "There is scarce a city or town of any importance in Europe that is not possessed of a collection of that kind; but in the United States of America ... there is scarcely a collection deserving of the name."
In the fashion of the time, Delacourte sought "subscriptions" to support his collecting endeavors — in particular, to finance his search for a mastodon somewhere in North America. Although a number of prominent New Yorkers subscribed token amounts, the largest contribution he received was three dollars. On the verge of bankruptcy, he finally sold his collection to Russia.
A few years later, one of Charles Willson Peale's sons (the elder Peale had founded the first museum in America, in Philadelphia) opened a Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts on lower Broadway. Its several galleries displayed paintings and various odd natural history items. A contemporary described it as having "very superior Cosmorana, several wax figures of good workmanship, fossil shells, minerals and miscellaneous curiosities." Like its fellow, this early museum also perished from lack of interest.
The idea of a natural history museum in New York finally began to attract attention with the opening of the Lyceum of Natural History at its headquarters on lower Broadway in 1836. A number of leading scientists joined the Lyceum, including John James Audubon, Alexander Agassiz, and Asa Gray. They met periodically at the Lyceum and delivered papers. Its collections were more systematically organized, and included such things as mastodon bones found in upstate New York, a sheep from the Rocky Mountains, a "catalogue of the vegetables growing within one hundred miles of New York City," minerals, snakes, fossils, plants, and shells. All this material was stored in sixty-two boxes. Unfortunately, the Lyceum became too dependent on the generosity of one man, John Jay, an amateur scientist and collector of rare books. (His fine collections of shells and natural history books are now at the American Museum of Natural History.) In an effort to broaden its support, the Lyceum sent a circular to a number of prominent New York businessmen, asking for money, but raised only seven hundred dollars in the attempt. The Lyceum and its growing financial problems were abruptly ended on May 21, 1866, when a fire totally destroyed its uninsured collections.
THE GREAT AND WONDERFUL PALEOZOIC MUSEUM
By far the most ambitious undertaking was the great Paleozoic Museum planned for Central Park. It was to be based on London's famous Crystal Palace, which had been erected for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee and Great Exhibition of 1851. After the Great Exhibition closed, the Crystal Palace had been dismantled and moved to Sydenham Park, outside London, and a painter and sculptor named Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins had been hired to make full-scale restorations of extinct creatures to decorate the grounds of the park. Working with Sir Richard Owen, the famous English paleontologist who coined the word dinosauria, Hawkins put together an ambitious plan that called for an outdoor park complete with pools, streams, and artificial geological formations populated with life-sized models of dinosaurs. The waters were designed to rise and fall like the tide, partially covering the creatures. Under Owen's guidance, Hawkins built a number of giant models, some weighing as much as thirty tons.
Sydenham Park caused quite a sensation. News of the London dinosaurs reached the States, and soon caught the attention of the Board of Commissioners of Central Park. In 1868, Andrew Green, the head of the board, decided to build a similar Paleozoic museum in Central Park, which was then under planning and construction. "It gives me great pleasure," he wrote to Hawkins, "to propose to you to undertake the resuscitation of a group of animals of the former periods of the American continent." In 1868 the annual report of the Central Park commissioners waxed eloquent about the proposed project:
For thousands of years men have dwelt upon the earth without even suspecting that it was a mighty tomb of animated races that once flourished upon it ... Generations of the most gigantic and extraordinary creatures ... huge fishes, enormous birds, monstrous reptiles, and ponderous uncouth mammals.
Green pushed hard for the project, calling it a monument to "the degree of culture and advancement" in the New York community. Not everyone, however, agreed with Green's vision of what constituted science. One less-than-enthusiastic scientist described the plan as a
gloomy and half subterranean receptacle for restorations, a sort of fossil catacombs wherein the visitor, suppressing his dismay and encouraging his understanding, would wander about through shapes of pre-Adamite existence, and escape again into the light of day like Marcellus and Bernardo, "distilled almost to jelly with the act of fear." New York was spared this unnecessary and theatrical episode.
Actually, the park would have been rather spectacular, an extravagance appropriate for New York. A giant iron framework covered with vines was intended to arch over the Paleozoic Museum, and rows of neoclassic columns would have lined both sides. A menagerie of extinct mammals and dinosaurs was to have populated the Museum, a museum devoted to American beasts.
Hawkins arrived in the States and enthusiastically set to work, seeking out American fossils and visiting museums all over the country. At the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, he was delighted to find the famous Hadrosaurus that had been dug up in Haddonfield, New Jersey, in 1858 — the first American dinosaur. The Academy had already created a mold of the animal, and Hawkins acquired it for Central Park. Back in New York, he formulated a dramatic prehistoric tableau. He planned to show the Hadrosaurus being attacked by a carnivorous dinosaur, Laelaps, while two other Laelaps feasted on the corpse of yet another Hadrosaur. Nearby, the marine reptile Elasmosaurus would lurk in the shallow water of a pool. Moving farther along the evolutionary ladder, Hawkins had planned for two giant armadillos, mastodons, giant sloths, and a giant elk to round out the picture of "pre-Adamite" existence. At a cost of $30,000, the foundation of the Museum was laid near West 63rd Street in the park.
Then the notorious William "Boss" Tweed came to power. Tweed (who several years later would be convicted of embezzling millions of dollars in city funds) made the Paleozoic Museum the target of a political power–play in 1870. He halted work on the restorations on the pretense that the $300,000 price tag of the new museum was unaffordable. (In fact, Tweed was angry because he could find no way to reap illegal profits and kickbacks from the museum's construction.) He installed his own henchmen as Central Park commissioners, who immediately scotched the project and ordered the museum's foundations plowed under.
Hawkins was persistent, however, and continued to work on the project, hoping that the Smithsonian Institution would in time take an interest in his work. But Tweed wanted him out of New York entirely. The following year, vandals under orders from the Tweed Ring broke into Hawkins' studio and smashed the dinosaurs with sledgehammers. They later returned and destroyed Hawkins' molds and smaller models. Henry Hilton, one of Tweed's henchmen, told Hawkins that he "should not bother himself about dead animals when there were so many living ones to care for."
The fragments disappeared, rumored to have been buried somewhere in the park. Several years later a magazine reported that some of the fragments had been dug up in a southern section of the park, but were "utterly worthless." Hawkins, deeply shocked by the episode and disgusted with America, became an academic recluse at Princeton and later returned to England.
* * *
New York was once again without a museum. But other plans were already under way. A young, highly enthusiastic man from Maine, Albert S. Bickmore, had for several years been canvassing the New York elite with a "sketch plan" for a natural history museum in New York City, attempting to persuade them that here — finally — was a museum project worthy of their support. In 1869, the same year that Hawkins was putting the finishing touches on his doomed Hadrosaurus models, the American Museum of Natural History was born.
CHAPTER 2Professor Bickmore's Museum
Stored in an obscure drawer in the Museum's vast photographic archives is an unusual trio of photographs. The first shows a Victorian gentleman with a magnificent white beard, wearing a black frock coat, a starched shirt, a tie tack, and a gold watch chain. The second shows the same stiff man in profile. The third, just as formal as the others, is the rear view of the elderly gentleman; all one can see is the back of his balding pate.
This triptych of photographs is the official portrait of Professor Albert S. Bickmore, founder of the American Museum of Natural History, taken around the turn of the century. He directed that his portrait be taken in this unusual fashion because it was the way nineteenth-century anthropologists traditionally photographed their aboriginal subjects: from the front, side, and back, like a series of mug shots. The Museum's photographic archives contain tens of thousands of such photographic trios — snapshots of Eskimos, Aleuts, Mongolians, Ainus, and many others.
That Bickmore requested such a portrait gives us an insight into his character. At the least, it was an eccentric idea that anticipated by a quarter of a century our modern concepts of cultural relativism. Conventional notions of propriety and personal dignity — usually of such importance to the Victorians — didn't concern Bickmore. His colleagues described him as an extremely optimistic and enthusiastic person, able to excite even the most phlegmatic audience. He had an entrepreneur's personality. Bickmore's goal — to found the country's greatest museum of natural history, and to do it in New York City — was ambitious in the extreme. He had no social connections and no money; his academic credentials were fair but not impeccable; and he was young and inexperienced. But he was the kind of man the rich railroad and banking magnates of New York City would understand. And this talent was to play a crucial role in the founding of the Museum.
Bickmore was born in 1839 in St. George, a small town on the Maine coast opposite Monhegan Island. He was the son of an old New England family of sea captains and shipbuilders. In an unpublished autobiography now housed in the Museum's Rare Book Room, Bickmore tells of spending much of his time roaming the woods and shores of Maine, gathering shells, rocks, and other things of which natural history is made.
Bickmore went to Dartmouth College, at that time considered the poor man's Harvard, and there studied chemistry and geology. Upon graduation, he persuaded one of his professors to give him a letter of introduction to study under the eminent Swiss zoologist Louis Agassiz, who had recently established the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. In 1860, letter in hand, Bickmore traveled to the museum in Cambridge. There he was told that Agassiz could be found in the museum's basement, working in his vast collection. Bickmore descended to the basement and discovered a pompous little man (who turned out to be Agassiz) working "amid a great array of bottles of alcoholic specimens."
Agassiz gave Bickmore his standard "entrance examination." He would give his prospects a specimen — in Bickmore's case, a sea urchin — and require them to study it, in excruciating detail, for weeks on end. "In six weeks," Agassiz told Bickmore, "you will either become utterly weary of the task, or else you will be so completely fascinated with it as to devote your whole life to the pursuit of our science." Bickmore passed the test and, as one of Agassiz' assistants, was charged with caring for the radiates and mollusks in the Museum's collection.
Bickmore had other things in mind than invertebrates. He was nursing a secret ambition, and an opportunity to put his idea to the test soon arose. In 1861 the Prince of Wales visited the United States with his tutor, Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, founder of the Oxford University Museum (England's counterpart to the Museum of Comparative Zoology). When the royal entourage visited Harvard, Bickmore, who was only twenty-two, buttonholed Dr. Acland in private. "Does it seem strange to you, sir," Bickmore asked him, "that Agassiz, our great teacher, should have located his museum of natural history for future America out here in Cambridge, while in Europe the institutions of this character are placed in the political and monetary capitals of the several empires?"
"Yes, it does seem strange," Acland replied, "but what has suggested such a question to your mind?"
"Now New York," Bickmore continued, "is our city of the greatest wealth and therefore probably the best location for the future museum of natural history for the whole land."
"He simply turned toward me," Bickmore recalled, "and, looking me straight in the eye, said, 'My young friend, that is a grand thought.'
"I at once determined that I would work for nothing else by day and dream of nothing else by night."
The young man's plans were hastened, however unintentionally, by Agassiz himself. A European of the old school, Agassiz ran his operation in a dictatorial fashion. He forbade his students to publish their research until he decided they were ready — which was far too long for Bickmore. When Bickmore and other students tried to find jobs elsewhere without informing Agassiz, the scientist was enraged. The final blow came when Agassiz discovered that Bickmore had been secretly raising money for an expedition to the Far East. In 1863, Agassiz declined to recommend Bickmore to a permanent position as his assistant, which amounted to little more than a de facto firing.
Having raised enough money for his expedition, Bickmore set out for the East Indian Archipelago, carrying his two most treasured possessions: his Bible and a sketch plan of his own devising for the new museum. The primary purpose of the trip was to collect birds and shells from the Spice Islands, Borneo, Java, and the other Malaysian and East Indian islands. During the three-year expedition, Bickmore survived several earthquakes, a fall into a volcanic crater, a landslide, and the shock of seeing part of his rare bird collection appear on his dinner plate.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston. Copyright © 1986 Douglas J. Preston. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Acknowledgments,
Preface,
PART I: THE HISTORY,
1. The Museums That Almost Were,
2. Professor Bickmore's Museum,
3. The First Grand Expedition,
4. Exploration at the Top of the World,
5. The Search for the Arctic Atlantis,
6. The Great Dinosaur "Gold Rush",
7. In Deepest Africa,
8. Fossils in Outer Mongolia,
9. The Thirties and Beyond,
PART II: THE GRAND TOUR,
10. A Library of Bones,
11. Mammals,
12. Insects,
13. Amphibians and Reptiles,
14. Birds,
15. Anthropology,
16. Harry Shapiro and Peking Man,
17. Meteorites,
18. Minerals and Gems,
Conclusion,
Selected Bibliography,
Index,
Copyright,
