Dippy is a composite ''
Diplodocus
''Diplodocus'' (, , or ) was a genus of diplodocid sauropod dinosaurs, whose fossils were first discovered in 1877 by S. W. Williston. The generic name, coined by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1878, is a neo-Latin term derived from Greek δι ...
'' skeleton in
Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh ( ) is a city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, United States, and the county seat of Allegheny County. It is the most populous city in both Allegheny County and Western Pennsylvania, the second-most populous city in Pennsylva ...
's
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as CMNH) is a natural history museum in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was founded by Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896.
Housing some 22 million ...
, and the
holotype
A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of sever ...
of the
species
In biology, a species is the basic unit of classification and a taxonomic rank of an organism, as well as a unit of biodiversity. A species is often defined as the largest group of organisms in which any two individuals of the appropriate s ...
''Diplodocus carnegii''. It is considered the most famous single dinosaur skeleton in the world, due to the numerous
plaster casts donated by
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie (, ; November 25, 1835August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of the richest Americans i ...
to several major museums around the world at the beginning of the 20th century.
The casting and distribution of the skeleton made the word ''dinosaur'' a household word; for millions of people it became the first dinosaur they had ever seen. It was also responsible for the subsequent popularity of the entire genus ''Diplodocus'', since the skeleton has been on display in more places than any other
sauropod dinosaur.
["''Diplodocus''." In: Dodson, Peter & Britt, Brooks & Carpenter, Kenneth & Forster, Catherine A. & Gillette, David D. & Norell, Mark A. & Olshevsky, George & Parrish, J. Michael & Weishampel, David B. ''The Age of Dinosaurs''. Publications International, Ltd. pp. 58–59. .]
Its discovery was catalyzed by the announcement of the excavation of a large thigh bone (unrelated to Dippy) by William Harlow Reed near
Medicine Bow, Wyoming
Medicine Bow is a town in Carbon County, Wyoming, United States. Its population was 284 at the 2010 census.
History
The community largely owes its existence to the first transcontinental railroad, built through the area in 1868. A post office ...
in December 1898. On a return trip financed by Carnegie, Reed excavated Sheep Creek Quarry D in which he found the first part of Dippy's skeleton, a toe bone, on July 4, 1899. Its discovery on
Independence Day, and its use in American diplomacy via Carnegie's international donations of replicas, led to its being nicknamed the "star-spangled dinosaur". Dippy became the centrepiece of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, such that the museum became known as "the house that Dippy built".
In 2016, a petition to the
International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature was being considered which proposed to make ''Diplodocus carnegii'' the new
type species
In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specime ...
of ''Diplodocus''.
The proposal was rejected in 2018, and ''D. longus'' has been maintained as the type species.
Discovery
The skeleton was found in the upper of the Talking Rock facies of the Brushy Basin Member of the
Morrison Formation, in
Albany County, Wyoming.
In 1900,
John Bell Hatcher
John Bell Hatcher (October 11, 1861 – July 3, 1904) was an American paleontologist and fossil hunter known as the "king of collectors" and best known for discovering ''Torosaurus'' and ''Triceratops'', two genera of dinosaurs described by O ...
was hired by
William Jacob Holland
Rev William Jacob Holland FRSE LLD (August 16, 1848 – December 13, 1932) was the eighth Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh (1891–1901) and Director of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. He was an accomplished zoologist and paleonto ...
as curator of paleontology and osteology for the
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as CMNH) is a natural history museum in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was founded by Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896.
Housing some 22 million ...
, succeeding
Jacob Lawson Wortman. Hatcher supervised the field expeditions, excavations, investigation and display of Dippy, and named the species for Carnegie. Hatcher's monograph on the find was published in 1901 as ''Diplodocus Marsh: Its Osteology, Taxonomy, and Probable Habits, with a Restoration of the Skeleton''.
It is a composite skeleton comprising:
* CM 84: the majority of the skeleton, named ''Diplodocus carnegii'', and published in 1901 by Hatcher
* CM 94: supplemented missing bones
* CM 307: the tail
* CM 662 and USNM 2673: skull elements. In 2015, the USNM skull was recategorized as ''
Galeamopus
''Galeamopus'' is a genus of herbivorous diplodocid sauropod dinosaurs. It contains two known species: ''Galeamopus hayi'', known from the Late Jurassic lower Morrison Formation (Kimmeridgian age, about 155 million years ago) of Wyoming, Unit ...
'', along with several other ''Diplodocus'' skulls, leaving no definite ''Diplodocus'' skulls known.
* some foot and limb bones of a ''
Camarasaurus''
Pittsburgh display
The original skeleton has been on display at the
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as CMNH) is a natural history museum in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It was founded by Pittsburgh-based industrialist Andrew Carnegie in 1896.
Housing some 22 million ...
since April 1907, two years after the first cast was shown. The delay was due to construction work at the Pittsburgh museum, which needed expansion in order to house Dippy. Today, the skeleton is part of the ''Dinosaurs in Their Time'' exhibition.
Casts
Background
Industrialist
Andrew Carnegie
Andrew Carnegie (, ; November 25, 1835August 11, 1919) was a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of the richest Americans i ...
financed the acquisition of the skeleton in 1898, as well as the donation of the casts at the beginning of the 20th century.
[Rea, 2001, pp. 1–11 and 198–216.] His great-grandson, William Thomson, was quoted in 2019 explaining the donations: "By gifting copies to the heads of state of seven other countries as well as the UK, Carnegie hoped to demonstrate through mutual interest in scientific discoveries that nations have more in common than what separates them. He used his gifts in an attempt to open inter state dialogue on preserving world peace – a form of Dinosaur diplomacy."
London cast
The London cast of Dippy came about when King
Edward VII
Edward VII (Albert Edward; 9 November 1841 – 6 May 1910) was King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and Emperor of India, from 22 January 1901 until his death in 1910.
The second child and eldest son of Queen Victoria and ...
, then a keen trustee of the
British Museum
The British Museum is a public museum dedicated to human history, art and culture located in the Bloomsbury area of London. Its permanent collection of eight million works is among the largest and most comprehensive in existence. It docum ...
, saw a sketch of the bones at Carnegie's Scottish home,
Skibo Castle
Skibo Castle (Scottish Gaelic: ''Caisteal Sgìobail'') is located to the west of Dornoch in the Highland county of Sutherland, Scotland overlooking the Dornoch Firth. Although largely of the 19th century and early 20th century, when it was the hom ...
, in 1902, and Carnegie agreed to donate a cast to the Natural History Museum as a gift. Carnegie paid £2,000 for the casting in
plaster of paris
Plaster is a building material used for the protective or decorative coating of walls and ceilings and for moulding and casting decorative elements. In English, "plaster" usually means a material used for the interiors of buildings, while "re ...
, copying the original fossil bones held by the Carnegie Museum (not mounted until 1907, as a new museum building was still being constructed to house it).
The 292 cast pieces of the skeleton were sent to London in 36 crates, and the long exhibit was unveiled on May 12, 1905, to great public and media interest, with speeches from the museum director Professor
Ray Lankester
Sir Edwin Ray Lankester (15 May 1847 – 13 August 1929) was a British zoologist.New International Encyclopaedia.
An invertebrate zoologist and evolutionary biologist, he held chairs at University College London and Oxford University. He was th ...
, Andrew Carnegie,
Lord Avebury on behalf of the trustees, the director of the Carnegie Museum
William Jacob Holland
Rev William Jacob Holland FRSE LLD (August 16, 1848 – December 13, 1932) was the eighth Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh (1891–1901) and Director of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. He was an accomplished zoologist and paleonto ...
, and finally the geologist Sir
Archibald Geikie
Sir Archibald Geikie (28 December 183510 November 1924) was a Scottish geologist and writer.
Early life
Geikie was born in Edinburgh in 1835, the eldest son of Isabella Thom and her husband James Stuart Geikie, a musician and music critic. T ...
. The cast was mounted in the museum's Reptile Gallery to the left of the main hall (now the gallery of Human Biology) as it was too large to display in the Fossil Reptile Gallery (to the right of the main hall; now the gallery of Creepy Crawlies).
Dippy was taken to pieces and stored in the museum's basement during the Second World War to protect it from
bomb damage, and reinstalled in the Reptile Gallery after the war. The original presentation of the cast was altered several times to reflect changes in scientific opinion on the animal's stance. The head and neck were originally posed in a downwards position, and were later moved to a more horizontal position in the 1960s.
[The Telegraph]
The life story of Dippy the dinosaur
/ref>
Dippy was removed from the Reptile Gallery in 1979 and repositioned as the centrepiece of the main central hall of the museum, later renamed the Hintze Hall in recognition of a large donation by Michael Hintze
Michael Hintze, Baron Hintze, (born 27 July 1953) is an Australian-British businessman and philanthropist, based in the United Kingdom.
According to the '' Sunday Times'' 2019 Rich List, Hintze's net worth is 1.5 billion, an increase of ...
.[ Dippy replaced a mounted African elephant, nicknamed George, which had been on display as the central exhibit in the main hall since 1907, with various other animal specimens. The elephant had itself replaced the skeleton of a sperm whale which was the first significant exhibit in the hall and had been on display since at least 1895: earlier, the hall had been left largely empty. Dippy was originally displayed alongside a cast of a '']Triceratops
''Triceratops'' ( ; ) is a genus of herbivorous chasmosaurine ceratopsid dinosaur that first appeared during the late Maastrichtian stage of the Late Cretaceous period, about 68 million years ago in what is now North America. It is one ...
'' skeleton, which was removed around 1993. The tail of the ''Diplodocus'' cast was also lifted to waft over the heads of visitors; originally it drooped to trail along the floor.
The cast became an iconic representation of the museum. After 112 years on display at the museum, the dinosaur replica was removed in early 2017 to be replaced by the long skeleton of a young blue whale
The blue whale (''Balaenoptera musculus'') is a marine mammal and a baleen whale. Reaching a maximum confirmed length of and weighing up to , it is the largest animal known to have ever existed. The blue whale's long and slender body can ...
, dubbed "Hope". The work involved in removing Dippy and replacing it with the whale skeleton was documented in a BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC
Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board exam. ...
...
on July 13, 2017, the day before the whale skeleton was unveiled for public display.
Dippy started a tour of British museums in February 2018, mounted on a new, more mobile armature.
.
As director of the Carnegie Museums, William Holland supervised the donations of the casts. His trip to Argentina in 1912 was recorded by Holland in his 1913 travel book ''To the River Plate and Back''. Holland noted a poem which had become popular among college students:
, in tribute to the 100th anniversary of the discovery of Dippy. The dark, grayish brown life-size fiberglass model weighs , stands , and measures in length. The sculpture was created during a nine-month process from the original fossil. Sited along
.
In addition to its service as a mascot for the museum, ''Dippy'' has been seen sporting the
. Sometimes when it's cold out the staff dresses him up with a gigantic scarf. Dippy is a featured Pittsburgh landmark on
.