“I don’t see why not,” remarked Perry.
“Suppose you found the bones of a frog, but no one had ever seen a frog or anything that looked like one! You might set the animal up with those long doubled-up legs quite straight, so that he would look as though he were on stilts.”
“That would sure make a queer-looking beast,” said Perry, laughing.
“Exactly. So, in order to get an idea of the way the bones must have been during life, we dissected and studied nearly every living reptile, especially the alligators and the lizards, and worked out the muscles of almost all of them. Then the corresponding bones in the Brontosaurus were compared, and the position and size of the muscles worked out, as far as they could be judged from the notches and grooves still preserved on the bones.”
“My word, that’s real work!”
“You can be sure it was real work,” the professor assured him. “Then, Perry, we articulated the skeleton loosely, and the position and size of each muscle were judged from strips of paper we pasted on the bones to represent the muscles. As we moved the joints, we watched the paper move, and compared the movement of the paper with the muscles of the living reptiles. When we got the limbs into the proper places, the whole question of the weight and pose of the body, as it must have been in life, was worked out, and finally the skeleton was mounted in what must have been the characteristic position that the Brontosaurus assumed during life. That took us another three years. It was not until three years later, or six years altogether, that the Brontosaurus skeleton was finally mounted.”
Courtesy of American Museum of Natural History.
Brontosaurus in His Native Swamp.
Huge reptile of ten million years ago, weighing not less than 38 tons, seventy feet long, once a widely spread American species.