My name is Benjamin Burger, and today, I want
to tell you the story behind the discovery of Stegosaurus, and how over a century of
excavations, reconstructions and discovery, has led to a much better understand of this
iconic dinosaur. It is hard to imagine a time before we knew
about Stegosaurus, but the bones of Stegosaurus were not discovered until 1876, 35 years after
Richard Owen coined the term Dinosaur, and the first reconstructions of the iconic dinosaur
were not known until 50 years after the first discovery. Surprisingly when Stegosaurus was first found,
it was not considered initially a dinosaur by O.C. Marsh, the man behind the name Stegosaurus. Today, I want to explore how the idea of Stegosaurus
evolved and how our perception of this classic dinosaur has changed over time with new specimens
and new discoveries. The initial discovery of Stegosaurus is largely
due to the diligence of Arthur Lakes, a paleontologist and geologist not as well-known as he should
be. Arthur grew up in England and was educated at Queens College in Oxford, and travel first
to Canada, then onto the United States, where he found a job teaching in the Colorado Territory,
during the waning days of the Gold Rush. Arthur was a passionate rock collector, and
traded and collected mineral specimens that were discovered in many of the mines scattered
across the Rocky Mountains. He was a passionate geologist, later writing and publish geology
textbooks, particularly about ore and coal deposits in the American West. In 1873, the Episcopal Church under direction
of Bishop George Randall, opened the first college of higher education in Colorado called
Jarvis Hall, on a barren windy hillside outside of the town of Golden west of Denver. Shortly
after the school opened it became a secularized public institution, and today is the campus
of the Colorado School of Mines. Arthur Lakes was hired to teach to a small
number of students who enrolled at the school, bringing with him his interests in geology
and paleontology. He was beloved by his students, and spent much of his time collecting geological
specimens, and was also an accomplished artist painting in water-colors. In 1874, on a field trip with some students,
they discovered a fossil dinosaur tooth, now known to have belong to Tyrannosaurus from
the late Cretaceous Denver Formation, not far from the school he taught at. He showed the specimen to some other teachers
at the college, who recommending sending the specimen off to O.C. Marsh at Yale University. He did not receive a reply from Yale, but
by May of 1876, Arthur had amassed a sizable collection of other geological specimens,
including large dinosaur bones and exhibited his rock and fossil collection at the great
Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, a celebration of the 100th anniversary of the United States
of America. In its day, this event was like the greatest
Disney World theme park ever! Filled with the most cutting-edge science. Thomas Edison
was there, Alexander Graham Bell demonstrated his telephone to a mesmerized public, imported
bananas were sold for first time with people eating them with a knife and fork, the first
ever typewriter, complete with a QWERTY keyboard, the same arrangement we use today on laptops
and cell phones to send text messages, and there was Arthur Lakes rock and fossil collection. His rock and fossil collection was up against
the world’s greatest mineralogical specimens known at the time. You see, the exposition
was organized by region and country, and each country or state exhibited their own exceptional
collection of rocks, minerals, crystals, and fossils in their individual buildings or halls. Colorado, was proposing statehood that year,
and had to share a building with Kansas. So Inside the Kansas-Colorado building was a
model of the proposed state capital building, and was over flowing with the exhibit of Martha
Maxwell, who had started a natural history museum, called Mrs. Maxwell’s Museum in
Boulder Colorado. She was a world class taxidermist, inventing new techniques for natural poses
of animals, showing off the wildlife of Colorado. Based on photographs, in front of Mrs. Maxwell’s
exhibit, were some large dinosaur bones Arthur Lake had found along the front range of Colorado,
and included a few display cases of rocks and minerals of Colorado. The large fossil dinosaur bones on display
attracted the interests of Edward Drinker Cope and O.C. Marsh, the two world famous
paleontologists from the east coast, who saw the fossils of dinosaurs on display, and became
intrigued. Both Cope and Marsh offered to purchase the
fossil dinosaur bones from Arthur Lake, but as a man of science Arthur Lakes was more
interested in their scientific description and eventual display in a public museum. O.C. Marsh proposed funding Arthur Lake’s
continued collection of dinosaur bones in Colorado, rather than purchasing the fossils.
The less financially well-off Edward Cope had proposed just buying the fossils from
him. Arthur was more inclined to work with Marsh,
since he was a Professor at Yale University, and director of the Peabody Museum, where
as Cope was not affiliated with a university and working privately, although he had an
agreement with the National Academy of Sciences in Philadelphia. One particular specimen on display intrigued
both paleontologists, a small fragmentary skull, that preserved long narrow teeth, and
Arthur Lakes told the two paleontologists that more of the skeleton was likely still
buried in the ground. O.C. Marsh convinced Arthur Lakes to send
him the skull for a preliminary study, and to return to the field for the rest of the
skeleton. So, by early June 1876, Arthur was back in Colorado digging in a quarry and finding
additional dinosaur bones for O.C. Marsh. The quarry was 20 feet across and 10 to 15
feet deep into the dipping beds of the late Jurassic Morrison Formation north of the town
of Morrison Colorado. Working with a retired engineer with the Navy, Captain H. C. Beckwith,
Arthur and Beckwith dug, revealing in his words “several very large vertebra, two
nearly perfect long thigh bones saved as I can see vertebra attached to the flipper of
an animal of the plesisaurian kind.” The jumble of bones was shipped out to O.C. Marsh,
still embedded in a hard matrix of sandstone. Back at the Yale Peabody Museum, O.C. Marsh
begin trying to figure out what this animal looked like, having a fragmentary skull previous
loaned to him, and series of poorly preserved large bones. On November 15th 1877, O.C. Marsh gave a presentation
on the fossils sent to him and published a short one paragraph description in the American
Journal of Science in early December. Unbeknown to him, the skull was from a completely different
dinosaur, a Diplodocus sauropod long-necked dinosaur. Hence in Marsh’s initial paper he had the
bones of two very different dinosaurs mix up with each other, nevertheless, he named
the creature Stegosaurus armatus. The flipper bone that Arthur Lakes had mentioned
to him, extending from the vertebra, well Marsh recognized that bone as some type of
osteoderm, or portion of a hard shell, comparing the fossil to an ancient fossil sea turtle
called Protostega. Marsh also alluded to an affinity to Plesiosaurus, the loch-neck monster
like creature and viewed the animal as a marine or an aquatic swimming reptile, rather than
a dinosaur. While working on this short description of
the fossil, Arthur Lakes and H. C. Beckwith were conducting a more ambitious collection
of dinosaurs in 1877, and from April to June collected additional dinosaur bones sending
them to O.C. Marsh to describe. Among this collection of dinosaur bones were
giant dinosaurs which O.C. Marsh named Titanosaurus then renamed Atlantosaurus (since it was preoccupied
by a dinosaur named by Richard Lydekker from India a few months earlier), Apatosaurus and
Allosaurus, in October 1877. The newspapers reported on the discovery of
these dinosaurs in Colorado neglected to mention either Arthur Lake or H. C. Beckwith by name,
which caused them some alarm, at not receiving credit for all their hard work digging up
these monsterly large bones, which required dynamite and chisels and hammers. Hence Marsh
was careful to mention their names at the conclusion of his short description of Stegosaurus
on November 15th 1877. Edward Cope, Marsh’s rival would soon acquire
a similar collection of dinosaurs from the Jurassic Morrison Formation as well, from
the southern part of Colorado near the town of Canyon City in 1877, and find the next
Stegosaurus specimen. Dinosaur bones had been discovered near the
town as early as 1869, but news of these discoveries was not published in the newspapers until
January of 1877, when a local newspaper ran a story about dinosaurs being discovered by
Henry Felch north of town. The news drew the curiosity of Oramel Lucas,
a school teacher and superintendent of the public-school system there. Oramel was taking
classes through a correspondence with Oberlin College in Ohio, and wrote to one of his professors
about finding some dinosaur bones near town. His professor suggested he contact Marsh and
Cope, and see if they would be interested in them and working with him to excavate more.
In the early spring of 1877, Oramel Lucas wrote to both Marsh and Cope, and this time
Cope responded quickly hiring Oramel and his brother Ira to start excavations that summer. The Lucas brothers begin working the quarry
that became known as Cope’s Nipple with excavations starting in 1877 and worked on
until 1883, although the area still produces dinosaur fossils, including three important
Stegosaurus specimens we will talk about later. It was in this quarry, which was softer mudstone
that the Lucas brothers found a second specimen of a Stegosaurus like animal, named Hypsirhophus
discurus by Cope in 1878. There is some debate whether Hypsirhophus discurus is valid, the
most recent paper in 2015 has argued that it’s a synonymy of Stegosaurus, and I think
most people agree. Like Marsh’s specimen, Cope’s Stegosaurus
was not very complete. The specimen included only a partial dorsal vertebra, a rib fragment,
some caudal neural arches and centrum. Like Marsh’s specimen, bones of another dinosaur
where mix in with it, a theropod femur. However, in describing the specimen, Cope recognized
the fossils as belonging to a dinosaur. So despite two species named, paleontologists
really had no clue what Stegosaurus looked like, and there was no illustrations yet of
the dinosaur published or even attempted. That was about to change, but the discovery
would come in a mysterious letter sent to O.C. Marsh by the notorious Harlow and Edwards…. We will soon find out who Harlow and Edwards
were, but let me first read you their letter they sent….it reads like a ransom note…. Union Pacific Railroad Company, Agent’s
Office, Laramie Station, Wyoming July 19th 1877.
Dear Sir: I write to announce to you the discovery not
far from this place, of a large number of fossils, supposed to be those of the Megatherium,
although there is no one here sufficient of a geologist to state for certainty. We have
excavated 1 partly, and know where there is several others that we have not, as yet, done
any work upon. The formation in which they are found is that of the Tertiary Period.
We are desirous of disposing of what fossils we have, and also, the secret of the others.
We are working men and are not able to present them as a gift, and if we can sell the secret
of the fossil bed, and procure work in excavating others we would like to do so. We have said
nothing to anyone as yet. We measured one shoulder blade and found it to measure 4 feet
8 inches in length. One joint of the vertebrae measures two and half feet in circumference
and ten inches in length. As a proof of our sincerity and truth, we will send you a few
fossils, at what they cost us in time and money in unearthing. We would be pleased to
hear from you, as you are well known as an enthusiastic geologist, and a man of means,
both of which we are desirous of finding, more especially the latter. Hoping to hear
from you very soon, before the snows of winter set in we remain very respectfully your obedient
servants, Harlow and Edwards.” So Harlow and Edwards were the alias of two
railroad workers who had found large fossilized bones near Medicine Bow Wyoming, near the
rail-station that they worked at. They had fallen on hard times and hoped that they could
get O.C. Marsh to pay for their extraction and sell the bones to him for a large sum
of money. Marsh replied to the letter, asking them to
send the bones to him in Connecticut, which they did, but it took until mid-October of
1877 until the package arrived at the museum, which relayed the message that there were
more bones if he was interested. Marsh sent a check to Harlow and Edwards for
$75 about $2,000 in today’s money. Sadly, when it arrived they could not cash the check,
since Harlow and Edwards were the alias of William Carlin the Station agent and William
Reed the section foreman on the railway line. Marsh wired Samuel Williston a man who had
been working on the Morrison excavations with Arthur Lakes to head to Wyoming immediately.
Samuel Williston took the train and meet up with Harlow and Edwards on a chilly November
14th day. Harlow and Edwards sheepishly explained that they used made up the names Harlow and
Edwards, they took Samuel Williston to the site of their bone discovery, a ridge called
Como Bluff, that lay just a few miles from the railway tracks. It was filled with thousands of dinosaur bones.
The site was amazing since it was about 1 mile from the railway line and the two men
had spent the summer excavating the site, a place that would be called Quarry 1, and
had hundreds of bones ready to ship out. Samuel Williston sent a letter to Marsh, who
drew up a contract with the two men that he would purchase the fossils and pay them a
salary, as long as he could have an experienced paleontologist over see the excavations. The two men agreed as the cold Wyoming winter
set in. Excavations started immediately and through the winter of 1877-1878, the team
dug, lifted, boxed and carried by hand the numerous giant and very heavy dinosaur bones
down to the rail station during the bitter cold of a Wyoming winter. The team at first worked well together, but
the grueling work soon dispirited them. The first man to abandon the group was William
Carlin, the Station Agent, who leaked to the newspapers the discovery, and exaggerated
how much they were getting paid, in the hopes of attracting the interest of Edward Cope
to hire him at a higher salary. Whether the leak worked as planned, or not,
Carlin started collecting for Edward Cope in the Summer of 1878, and refused to let
William Reed ship the bones from the station house. Hence by the summer of 1878 fossils
were flowing to both Marsh and Cope, although the vast majority ended up in Marsh’s collection. By the next winter of 1878-1879 William Reed
was working alone or with a small grew collecting for O.C. Marsh, while William Carlin was collecting
for Edward Cope only a few yards away. By this time Reed had opened 5 numbered quarries,
including quarry 4 on the far end of the ridge. When summer arrived in 1879, both Edward Cope
and O.C. Marsh visited the quarries at Como Bluff. William Carlin sent Cope one of the few dinosaurs
that was excavated that year and Cope hastily wrote about the specimen he named Hypsirhophus
seeleyanus, named for the English dinosaur paleontologist Harry Seeley, and anus, which
I don’t think Cope meant anything by it because he called Harry Seeley a friend in
the paper. In any case the specimen was lost, which might
be good thing since he described the teeth resembling the meat-eating dinosaur Megalosaurus,
indicating that this species was obviously a jumble of various other dinosaur bones,
like Allosaurus. And did not make any note of the diagnostic plates that characterize
Stegosaurus today. In the Summer of 1879 O.C. Marsh himself and
Arthur Lakes visited the ridge, with O.C. Marsh discovering Quarry 7, and later Arthur
Lakes finding the first fossil mammal jaw from Quarry 9. A few of these bone quarries produced a few
Stegosaurus bones, such as Quarry 4, but none was as rich in Stegosaurus bones, as Quarry
11, Quarry 12, and Quarry 13 discovered during the summer and late fall of 1879. These bones
included most of the skeleton of Stegosaurus, but from 7 different individuals, and scattered
across the three quarries. The bones were all disarticulated and boxed
up for preparation back at the Yale Peabody Museum in New Haven Connecticut. Where O.C.
Marsh and his team were tasked at reconstructing these bones into the creature we know today
as Stegosaurus. From 1879 until 1896, O.C. Marsh was tasked
with reconstructing the anatomy of Stegosaurus from these seven jumbled collections of bones.
O.C. Marsh published seven papers on Stegosaurus up to his death in 1899. In December of 1879, O.C. Marsh published
his first paper on Stegosaurus from Como Bluff Wyoming, where he named the species Stegosaurus
ungulatus, and described the huge plates that protected the animal. But featured no illustrations
of the bones. In March of 1880, Marsh published the first
ever illustrations of the fossil plates and tail spikes of Stegosaurus, but was still
very much confused about the skull, which you remember the initial specimen he named
Stegosaurus included the skull of Diplodocus a very different type of dinosaur, a long
neck sauropod. Hence his description includes that of the skull of Diplodocus, with its
pencil-like teeth and small brain, that was collected from Quarry 8, and completely misidentified
as that belonging Stegosaurus. In February of 1881 Marsh published an infamously
incorrect description of Stegosaurus, in describing the spinal cord. Remember that he had the
skull of Diplodocus, but matched it with the sacrum of Stegosaurus, and was amazed to see
a large cavity in the opening for the spinal-cord, within the sacrum. It was much larger than the brain cavity seen
in the misidentified skull. Hence Marsh inferred that Stegosaurus had a larger hind-brain,
and mistakenly believed Stegosaurus of having two functional brains, with the hind-brain
being dominate one since it was much bigger. The paper also features the first illustration
of the articulated forelimb and hindlimb, which were proportionally very different,
suggesting to Marsh that Stegosaurus was bipedal, walking only on the hind-legs. These would
all be proven false. But inspired the 1884 reconstruction by A. Tobin of a bipedial armored
dinosaur. In 1883 Cope was running low on funds, while
O.C. Marsh begin to get government contract work with the United States Geological Survey
to fund his research on dinosaurs. He convinced the United State Government to fund the publication
of a massive volume on dinosaurs, and to continue to collection of new specimens in the American
West, with specimens going to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. Marsh hired Marshall P. Felch, whose brother
had reported on the first dinosaur bones in Canon City, Colorado and with Cope unable
to support the quarry work there by the Lucas brothers, Marsh took over collections from
the area in 1884, a quarry that would be called the Felch Quarry 1, and in the center of this
jumble of fossilized dinosaurs was the first most complete Stegosaurus specimen to be collected.
Including the first correctly attributed skull of Stegosaurus. In 1887, Marsh figured the correct skull of
Stegosaurus from the Canon City quarry, correcting the mistake he made before, although he introduced
the idea of identifying the various species he had named by different numbers of tail
spikes, with between 8 and 2 spikes reported from different species he had named. We now
know that all species of Stegosaurus had only 4 tail spikes. For the next ten years, Marsh worked on a
detailed illustration of the many dinosaurs he had acquired for the Peabody Museum, and
using government funds to publish beautifully illustrated drawings of dinosaur bones in
his collection. In 1897, just two years before his death,
the lavishly large volume was published, as a USGS monograph to the United States Congress. In plate 52, in his great monographic volume
on dinosaurs, was the first reconstruction of Stegosaurus with the plates along the back
in a single row, and 8 rather than 4 tail spikes. This reconstruction would be instrumental
at shaping our understanding of Stegosaurus and dinosaurs in the coming century. The illustrator Charles Knight, used Marsh’s
1897 reconstruction for his early life-reconstruction of Stegosaurus, the first ever painting of
Stegosaurus, complete with eight spikes on the tail and interesting enough paired plates.
This illustration was used to create a life reconstruction for the Smithsonian Museum
in 1904. The task of mounting a skeleton of Stegosaurus
fell to Richard Lull, the paleontologist hired after the death of O.C. Marsh by Yale University.
And a controversial scientist for his unorthodox views of evolution. O.C. Marsh had left the blue print for how
the bones went together with his illustrations, and Richard Lull headed the team to put the
bones together for display at the museum, a task that took him 12 years. Richard Lull described stegosaurus as “the
most grotesque reptile the world ever saw.” And in 1910, published a paper describing
the plates as paired along the back of stegosaurus, rather than a single file of plates, similar
to the idea Charles Knight had in his painting. Two preparators at the Peabody museum, Hugh
Gibb and W.S. Benton mounted the heavy fossilized bones using the various partial sets of bones
from Como Bluff Wyoming, since the more complete stegosaurus specimen from Colorado went to
the Smithsonian. Having acquired the more complete Stegosaurus
specimen from Colorado, the Smithsonian mounted its own skeleton, noting that Stegosaurus
had only 4 tail spikes, and that the plates alternated in paired fashion along the back.
In 1914, this version of Stegosaurus with its life-like reconstruction went on display,
and still remains, hundred years later, one of the most actuate depictions of Stegosaurus. The Yale Peabody Stegosaurus, underwent revision
in 1924, and again in 2010, when the paleontology hall was refurbished. Additional fossils of Stegosaurus would be
found with two additional very complete skeletons from Canyon City discovered by a high school
teacher named Frederick Kessler in 1937, and excavated by local high school students, and
a remarkable specimen discovered by Bryan Small for the Denver Museum in 1992. Many additional specimens were found in Dinosaur
National Monument in Utah, leading to the knowledge that Stegosaurus was a widespread
genus in the late Jurassic of Western North America. Today hundreds of specimens are known of Stegosaurus,
including juvenile specimens, and while there is some debate on the pose and function of
the plates along its back, differences between the various skeletons, the early pose of the
1914 mount of Stegosaurus still remains the standard view of Stegosaurus today. I want to thank Brian Clever, Paolo Luzzatto-Fegiz,
Arctodus18.11, Justin Bovee, Emmett Larson, and Marlowe Andreyko and Fred Olney. Thank
you everyone for your support on Patreon, if you would like to learn more about supporting
these education videos on paleontology and geology, check out the link in the description
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