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***
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DINOSAURS
With Special Reference to the American Museum Collections
by
W. D. MATTHEW
Curator of Vertebrate Palæontology

... '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.
Palæontology 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