THE ALPHA-BESTIARY
D is for Disraeli,
The dinosaur from Denver,
Who delivered stray dogs to dowagers,
And decked out derelicts with decent dress.
He fell in love on a day in June,
Went howling under the Colorado moon,
Which peeved the people prodigiously.
They bedeviled Disraeli for the dirges he droned Till he wept like a destitute dervish
And drowned the dinosaur bedevilers of Denver.
D is for Disraeli,
The dinosaur from Denver,
Who delivered stray dogs to dowagers,
And decked out derelicts with decent dress.
He fell in love on a day in June,
Went howling under the Colorado moon,
Which peeved the people prodigiously.
They bedeviled Disraeli for the dirges he droned Till he wept like a destitute dervish
And drowned the dinosaur bedevilers of Denver.
When 23-year-old Edward Drinker Cole was visiting Berlin he had written 37 scientific papers though he had quit school when he was 16. He met and befriended there Othniel Charles Marsh, a 32-year-old graduate student student at the University of Berlin who had only published 2 papers though he has a master's degree from Yale University. Cope returned to Philadelphia and his rich father arranged for Haverford College to award him an honorary degree so it could hire him as a zoology professor, but he resigned and became a farmer in Haddonfield, New Hersey, to be close to the fossil beds in the western part of the state, though he later resumed teaching. Marsh returned to Yale and became the 1st paleontology professor in the US and became a curator and trustee of the school's new Peabody Museum of Natural History, funded by his uncle George Peabody. Soon both men engaged in a fierce competition to find new fossil bones and bankrupted themselves in their rivalry. In 1877 Cope responded to a notice from a Colorado man concerning some bones he had found (Marsh declined to respond), leading to the discovery and classification of Camarasaurus supremus, a quadrupedal, herbivorous dinosaur. Marsh made a similar find, which he called Morosaurus grandis, but this was actually a species of Camarasaurus. In 1877-78, working in what is now Dinosaur Ridge, just west of Denver, Marsh catalogued stegosaurus, apatosaurus, allosaurus, and diplodocus fossils. Since their Bone Wars, Colorado has become one of the leading fossil fields, including the Carnegie Dinosaur Quarry (its 1,500 dinosaur bones have been left in place in a cliff wall for visitors to see) and the Picketwire Canyonlands (its almost 1,300 tracks from 100 different dinosaurs is the largest collection of fossilized footprints in the US).
ReplyDelete