The following extract is from the American Museum Journal for January 1908.[7]
"Although smaller than its huge contemporary Brontosaurus, this animal is of gigantic proportions being 34 feet 2 inches in length, and 8 feet 3 inches high."
After Osborn
Fig. 11.—Mounted Skeleton of Allosaurus in the American Museum.
History of the Allosaurus Skeleton. "This rare and finely preserved skeleton was collected by Mr. F.F. Hubbell in October 1879, in the Como Bluffs near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, the richest locality in America for dinosaur skeletons, and is a part of the great collection of fossil reptiles, amphibians and fishes gathered together by the late Professor E.D. Cope, and presented to the American Museum in 1899 by President Jesup.
"Shortly after the Centennial Exposition (1876) it had been planned that Professor Cope's collection of fossils should form part of a great public museum in Fairmount Park, Philadelphia, the city undertaking the cost of preparing and exhibiting the specimens, an arrangement similar to that existing between the American Museum and the City of New York.[8]
"The plan, however, fell through, and the greater part of this magnificent collection remained in storage in the basement of Memorial Hall in Fairmount Park, for the next twenty years. From time to time Professor Cope removed parts of the collection to his private museum in Pine Street, for purposes of study and scientific description. He seems, however, to have had no idea of the perfection and value of this specimen. In 1899 when the collection was purchased from his executors by Mr. Jesup, the writer went to Philadelphia under the instructions of Professor Osborn, Curator of Fossil Vertebrates, to superintend the packing and removal to the American Museum. At that time the collection made by Hubbell was still in Memorial Hall, and the boxes were piled up just as they came in from the West, never having been unpacked. Professor Cope's assistant, Mr. Geismar, informed the writer that Hubbell's collection was mostly fragmentary and not of any great value. Mr. Hubbell's letters from the field unfortunately were not preserved, but it is likely that they did not make clear what a splendid find he had made, and as some of his earlier collections had been fragmentary and of no great interest, the rest were supposed to be of the same kind.
"When the Cope Collection was unpacked at the American Museum, this lot of boxes, not thought likely to be of much interest, was left until the last, and not taken in hand until 1902 or 1903. But when this specimen was laid out, it appeared that a treasure had come to light. Although collected by the crude methods of early days, it consisted of the greater part of the skeleton of a single individual, with the bones in wonderfully fine preservation, considering that they had been buried for say eight million years. They were dense black, hard and uncrushed, even better preserved and somewhat more complete than the two fine skeletons of Allosaurus from Bone-Cabin Quarry, the greatest treasures that this famous quarry had supplied. The great carnivorous dinosaurs are much rarer than the herbivorous kinds, and these three skeletons are the most complete that have ever been found. In all the years of energetic exploration that the late Professor Marsh devoted to searching for dinosaurs in the Jurassic and Cretaceous formations of the West, he did not obtain any skeletons of carnivorous kinds anywhere near as complete as these, and their anatomy was in many respects unknown or conjectural. By comparison of the three Allosaurus skeletons with one another and with other specimens of carnivorous dinosaurs of smaller size in this and other museums, particularly in the National Museum and the Kansas University Museum, we have been able to reconstruct the missing parts of the Cope specimen with very little possibility of serious error."