Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
Unearthing a Saurolophus Skeleton.
Crested dinosaur of the Cretaceous period, allied to Trachodon, skull seen in foreground.
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
Unearthing a Diplodocus Hind Limb.
Amphibious dinosaur of the Jurassic Period, found at Big Bone Cabin quarry.
“I can see how that would be,” the boy exclaimed, “I didn’t cut my Pteranodon entirely away from the rock, and just to get it partly cleared away was an awful job.”
“Mounting that big skeleton was unbelievably hard,” the professor continued. “No museum had ever before attempted to mount so large a fossil skeleton, and you see, Perry, the bones were so fragile that they could not even bear their own weight, much less the weight of the skeleton. Nearly every separate bone had to be specially treated and hardened so as to be rigid. Then came the question as to the way in which the bones were to be articulated together. No one had ever seen a living Brontosaurus, of course, and so there was no guide as to what he looked like. The bones were there, but bones aren’t a safe guide by themselves.”