Friday, 5 February 2016

Thirty-six Double Four-Patches

Last month the American Museum of Natural History in New York (think Night at the Museum) unveiled its newest exhibit: the skeleton of what may be the largest dinosaur ever discovered. Titanosaur (It doesn’t even have a scientific name yet) was 122 feet long – four times the length of the museum’s famous blue whale. According to the museum’s catalog, there should be a vertibra in their possession belonging to an even bigger sauropod. The five-foot-long section of spine was part of a massive shipment donated by the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope at the time of his death. The vertibra is listed on the shipping manifest. The museum has a description but no bone. For over a hundred years, folk have been searching for solid evidence that the largest known creature – Amphicoelias fragillimus – ever existed. It seems more than likely to me that Cope simply made it up. After all, it was too big to lose.

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