Chapter Fifteen
IN OCTOBER 1915, A BRITISH ARMY REGIMENT OF VOLUNteer soldiers launched a major attack on German trenches dug into the marshy meadows outside of the village of Loos in northern France. Few of the men rushing toward battle had any preparation for warfare, leaving them disoriented in the chaos of the Western Front. Hoping to break through the enemy’s lines, forces under Field Marshal Sir John French fired cylinders of chlorine gas ahead of their charge, the first time that the British Army engaged in chemical warfare. “The gas hung in a thick pall over everything, and it was impossible to see more than ten yards. In vain I looked for my landmarks in the German line, to guide me to the right spot, but I could not see through the gas,” a second lieutenant wrote to his fiancée during a lull in the fighting. The British suffered over fifty thousand casualties that month, nearly double that of the Germans. Among the possessions of German forces camped in France were copies of a magazine called Die weissen Blätter, which contained a just-published novella titled The Metamorphosis written by an insurance officer in Prague named Franz Kafka.
That same month, near the Pacific, a recently divorced poet named Sara Bard Field led rallies for women’s suffrage in small towns through California and Nevada each evening as she made her way east during a cross-country drive in an open-air Oldsmobile from San Francisco to Washington, DC, where she planned to deliver a petition to President Woodrow Wilson demanding a constitutional amendment that would grant women the right to vote. Despite being accompanied by a driver and a mechanic, she found her progress stalled by poor road conditions and repeated attempts at sabotage. She eventually reached the White House in early January, with more than half a million signatures. A newspaper editor who was surprised that a prominent suffragist was physically attractive headlined a story about her arrival as “Mrs. Erghott Is Not Fat Woman,” using the married name she had abandoned. Not long after she arrived in DC, Field came up with the popular slogan “No votes, no babies!”
Along the eastern seaboard, the Boston Red Sox defeated the Philadelphia Phillies in five games to win the World Series in the span of less than a week, an ending so quick that a young Boston pitcher by the name of Babe Ruth made only one appearance during the entire series, grounding out as a pinch hitter in his team’s sole loss. Some ten thousand fans stood in Times Square watching an electric scoreboard that the New York Times had erected at the corner of West Forty-fourth Street and Broadway. “At one time the crowd was so great that it surged across Broadway. The wonderful mechanical device reproduced the plays almost simultaneously with their execution at the Phillies’ park at Philadelphia . . . on every side it was conceded to be the last word in automatic baseball portrayal contrivance,” the Times boasted.
And at the corner of West Seventy-seventh Street and Central Park West, in the only room on the fourth floor that could contain its height and weight, the world got its first glimpse of a fully mounted Tyrannosaurus rex. Gone were the pair of long legs and a pelvis that underwhelmed visitors when Osborn first unveiled them in a moment of weakness nearly a decade before. Instead, in the center of the Hall of the Age of Man, there stood a beast eighteen and a half feet tall that looked as if it were capable of stepping off its pedestal at any moment and leaving a trail of destruction across Manhattan.
Until that time, nearly every impressive dinosaur specimen in a museum exhibit anywhere in the world had been a herbivore, giving the impression that dinosaurs were outsized reptilian cows. That fell away in the presence of a massive carnivore. It was as if a sheet had finally been pulled down, revealing a world that had been hidden from view. Predation, protection, competition, decay; each aspect of the great struggle of life came together in the presence of a creature whose obvious power implied a full and vibrant ecosystem. The slow timetable of preparing the fossils and building a mount had left a large gap between what scientists knew about the former world and how they were able to present it to the public. The T. rex, whose dominance was so apparent that it needed no scientific explanation to be understood, narrowed it in an instant. Its strength was undeniable, forcing the recognition that dinosaurs were something more than a novelty and instead evidence that a dominant lifeform’s stay on Earth was not permanent. Physically, the beasts were monsters; symbolically, they implied that humans, too, would one day be replaced.
In truth, the specimen was not one animal, but several. With the only three known skeletons of T. rex in his possession, Osborn directed his staff to select the best parts of each, combining bones to create a display that was both the remnants of once-living creatures and a sculpture built with human hands. Bits of sandstone harder than granite still clung to parts of the skulls and vertebrae, a reminder of the nearly ten years of grueling work that it took to fully free the fossils from stone.
When completed, the specimen stood erect with its backbone almost vertical, like a kangaroo. Its tail dragged far behind, like the train of a wedding dress. The posture, which museum curators later dubbed a “Godzilla pose,” made the beast seem more even overwhelming than its massive jaws suggested, a staggering machine of destruction. (The specimen’s positioning would eventually be changed in the 1990s to reflect the fact that its backbone likely stretched out horizontally, with its tail gliding behind it in the air.) Its serrated teeth, each the size of a banana, glistened in the lamplight of the museum hall.
Osborn, finally free of the feeling that he was forever stuck in the wake of the Carnegie Museum, could not contain his sense of triumph. “This skeleton is the finest single exhibit in the department; its mounting technique is considered exceptionally good,—and of its kind unequaled; and the scientific value and popular interest are enhanced by the extreme rarity of these skeletons, their gigantic size and the fierce and predatory character of the animal,” he boasted in that year’s annual report.
Thousands of visitors stood outside the museum each day waiting their turn to view the beast, undeterred by neither the chilly weather nor the long lines. When it was their turn to marvel at the completed mount, many invariably stepped back in fright, utterly unprepared for the shock of staring up at a towering carnivore. Newspapers across the country covered the unveiling in breathless tones, as if unable to look away from the reappearance of a long-dead monster. Most articles focused on the grim specifics of the beast: the length of its teeth, the weight of its jaws, the ferocity of its appetite. The New York Herald devoted a full page of photographs to the new exhibit. “Behold the tyrano as he must have looked in life—except, of course, for the usual upholstering of flesh and hide,” it noted. “Books tell us that the carnivorous dinosaurus tyrranosaurus [sic] was a flesh-eating reptile with the tendencies of a tyrant. You better believe it.”
In a nearly full-page poem published in the New York Times, a humorist by the name of Captain George Steunenberg described his first encounter with the T. rex display.
Great shades of Father Adam, and Noah and the Ark!
What’s this ungodly thing I see right here near Central Park?
A skeleton of something rearin’ way up in the air
Its head cocked catawampus like a bronco on a tear
The poem ended with the refrain:
But then I guess you’ve had your day and so we’ll leave you here
Reflectin’ on the good old times of your remote career
May pleasant recollection dwell in that big bony head—
So long, you old hell-raiser: I’m most glad you’re dead!
The bones themselves were just part of what made the exhibit so captivating. Next to the specimen itself hung an oil painting by a museum staffer named Charles R. Knight that would become one of the most influential artworks in the museum’s history. Knight’s unusual path began in Brooklyn, where he was born with severe nearsightedness. A later injury to his right eye in childhood left him legally blind. His compromised vision did little to dent his fascination with animals, however, and at the age of twelve he enrolled in the Metropolitan Art School, which was housed in the basement of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Eventually staff at the American Museum noticed a thin young man with oversized glasses who could often be found in front of taxidermied animals in the exhibition halls, holding a sketchpad so close to his face that his nose pressed against the paper. The drawings he produced had a sense of buoyancy, as if his pencil was capable of reanimating life. Informed of his talents, Osborn commissioned him to paint prehistoric mammals. Pleased with the work, he brought him on staff and asked him to paint murals depicting dinosaurs in their natural habitat.
Prior to Knight, most illustrations of dinosaurs had shown them as dull, slow creatures, following Sir Richard Owen’s conception of the beasts as dimwitted and poorly matched with the world around them. Though he never went on a fossil expedition and had not trained as a scientist, Knight revolutionized the public conception of dinosaurs through beautiful paintings that portrayed alert, vibrant animals in moments of high danger: creeping up on an enemy, leaping with their claws out to slash an opponent in battle or devouring the meat of their prey. “I felt that I had stepped back into an ancient world—filled with all sorts of bizarre and curious things, and in imagination I could picture quite distinctly just what these mighty beasts looked like as they walked or swam in search of food,” Knight later wrote in an unfinished autobiography. In time, Knight would be recognized as the pioneer of what is now known as paleoart, a genre that incorporates scientific evidence to imagine distinct moments of drama in the lives of individual dinosaurs, depicting them as present in their prehistoric environment as a wild animal would be in a forest today.
For the 1915 exhibit, Knight painted a lone adult T. rex scanning the distance for potential prey. Its back is nearly vertical, making it appear taller than some of the nearby trees. Its eyes seem alive, its body alert. For the first time, the fearful symmetry of the creature’s bones disappeared behind a colorful, fully-realized animal, like finally seeing a completed building after looking only at its blueprints. Through art, Knight accomplished what paleontology had only before hinted at, showing the truth of a world populated with animals that were once as real as those at the nearby Central Park Zoo. Osborn had long wanted to dazzle visitors with two T. rex skeletons engaged in battle. With Knight’s mural, he accomplished something more: viewers could not only see the bones of the most ferocious animal that ever lived, but could walk away with the feeling that they had been transported back in time. There was no trickery or hokum involved, only the ability of a masterful painter to depict a world so complete that modern life shrank away to reveal the churn of billions of years of constant change on Earth.
The combination of art and anatomy prompted a public reaction unlike anything that had accompanied the unveiling of gargantuan specimens such as a Brontosaurus or Diplodocus. Instead of focusing on size alone, commentators were suddenly struck by the question of what the discovery of the T. rex meant for the importance of humankind in comparison. “We should worry. The animal kingdom may be losing in mere bulk and ponderosity,” the Los Angeles Times noted in an editorial that ran just a few days after the exhibit opened, and searched for a justification for the diminutive features of modern life that were far less physically impressive than the prehistoric past. Clearly, the T. rex would win a contest of sheer brawn; mammals, however, were blessed with more brains and beauty, the paper finally reasoned. “Bigness doesn’t count for everything, and we have implicit faith in the law of the survival of the fittest. Animal life may be growing ‘small by degrees’ but it also becomes ‘beautifully less.’ The tyrannosaurus was as ugly as the Maltese kitten is graceful.”
With its hulking power, the T. rex seemed to provide the perfect Darwinian fable. The American Museum was besieged with letters and questions, asking for an explanation of how such a ferocious creature with seemingly no natural enemies could have gone extinct. In the search for answers, scientists often projected their own prejudices. “Armored or unarmored, predatory or herbivorous, [dinosaurs] all disappeared, and the mammals entered into their heritage of the earth. Why they disappeared I do not certainly know—probably bigness had something to do with it; probably lack of brains had more,” W. D. Matthew, who succeeded Osborn as head of the museum’s Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, wrote in the New York Times, in an argument that carried a twinge of the eugenic movement’s obsession with intellectual ability. Unlike other large mounted dinosaur specimens, the T. rex seemed to function as a celebration of human intelligence, the rare scary thing that made a person feel better about themselves. Had it been alive, it could easily devour a person with its teeth larger than a human brain. Yet it was extinct and humans were not, a scoreboard that seemed to confirm the superiority of reason and intelligence above raw power.
In time, evidence that a meteor crashed into the Earth and rapidly changed the climate would undercut the notion that brains had anything to do with the fate of T. rex and other dinosaurs. (Indeed, contemporary scientists now believe that the species was roughly as intelligent as the chimpanzee.) But at that moment, the beast provided the symbol that Osborn had long been looking for to support his conceit that eugenics, with its misbegotten notion that intelligence was limited to heredity, could help humankind avoid the same fate. He had his monster, and the only thing left to do was stand and watch the crowds line up to gawk at it, his noxious influence growing more powerful by the day.
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THOUGH THE WORLD MIGHT NEVER have known of T. rex if not for his willingness to brave the canyons of Hell Creek, Barnum Brown did not linger in New York after its unveiling. Within a few months he was back in northern Montana, trying to pinpoint the exact layers of sediment above which no dinosaur fossils could be found. He often retreated into the badlands as a way of keeping the modern world and its responsibilities at a distance. Still, he could not deny the reality that his life was changing.
Before he discovered T. rex, he was a scrappy young man from Kansas whose only dream was to find enough fossils to allow him to continue a life of adventure. Since then, he had scaled the heights of his profession, discovering the vast majority of the bones on display in an institution now known around the world for its collection of dinosaurs. Yet he had also suffered unspeakable loss, which he was reminded of every time he slept with only the memory of Marion as comfort. Time seemed to be running away from him, the present more and more foreign. In a letter to Osborn, he confessed that a conversation with a local rancher made him feel like Rip Van Winkle, woefully out of date with the modern age. “People tell me of a ‘man who years ago took out big mastodons in the breaks’,” he wrote, both amused and saddened to realize that the man they were referring to was his younger self.
No matter how much he tried, he could never quite escape the present. Every so often, he traveled up to Oxford, where he would stay “for a few hours to see his daughter and settle finances with his father-in-law,” Frances later wrote. “She was aware of what her father did the days and months when she did not see him. In fact, she had her own name for his occupation, dubbing him a ‘dig-boner’.” After a visit he would often flee to the field, as if trying to keep the sense of responsibility off his scent.
That avenue of avoidance would soon close. The American Museum canceled its three planned field expeditions the following year, keeping Brown out of the dinosaur beds for the first time since Marion was pregnant. “The uncertainty as to how the entry of the United States into the world war might affect the affairs and staff of the Museum made it advisable to postpone fieldwork,” Matthew wrote in the annual report in 1917. Instead, Brown did what came naturally to a man for whom staying in one place felt like hell: he became a spy. In notes for his never-published biography, Brown wrote that he accepted a wartime role for the U.S. Treasury Department which he would only describe as “establishing depreciation and depletion of oil properties for taxation purposes.” Charting the world’s oil reserves relied on the same set of skills that allowed him to read rock formations. With a glance he could tell where sediment layers ended and identify the locations that were the most likely to contain oil fields below. Hunting natural resources and mineral wealth had once pushed miners in Europe deep into quarries from which they reemerged with strange bones; now, decades later, Brown reversed that process and used his abilities honed finding fossils to help the U.S. government locate and secure energy reserves for the war. In time, Brown would accept missions that took him to Turkey and other locations around the world, providing Washington with maps of likely untapped oil fields.
His clandestine work continued after the museum resumed funding digs, and for the remainder of his career he maintained an association with the many tentacles of the federal government. Sometimes the work was for private companies, and he shared the information gathered with the government; other times the work was explicitly for the government, meant for no one else’s eyes. Often he found himself working on expeditions that served both masters, such as a trip to Cuba in 1918 during which he uncovered fossilized mammals from a hot spring and evaluated potential mining sites for copper.
He continued to push himself past men half his age, while the friends and rivals he had worked with during the early stages of his career retired or settled into desk jobs at prominent museums. “I saw Dr. Barbour not long ago . . . he thinks you are working too hard,” Matthew wrote to Brown that spring, after learning that he was spending three hours a day building a machine to drain water out of a hot spring. “The point is this—your health . . . must override any other consideration. As a mere matter of policy it would be the worst sort of mistake to risk damage . . . as you are past the age of easy recuperation from damage.”
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WHILE BROWN CONTINUED TO PURSUE adventures that took him as far as India and Burma in search of fossils, his most famous discovery took on a life of its own. In 1914, a former newspaper cartoonist turned marble cutter named Willis O’Brien built a miniature boxer out of clay as a gag to break up the monotony of an afternoon. Another worker in the shop noticed what he was doing and built his own boxer, and the two staged a mock fight. O’Brien began to wonder if he could make it appear as if sculptures were moving on film if he stopped and repositioned them one frame at a time. With the help of a newsreel photographer, he climbed to the roof of the Bank of Italy building in San Francisco and filmed a crudely-made dinosaur and caveman jousting for survival. Looking to put this newfound visual sleight of hand to work, he made a series of five-minute films with titles like “Rural Delivery, Million B.C.” for the Edison Company, his skills improving with each completed product.
In 1918, O’Brien wrote to Barnum Brown asking for technical help on a movie he planned to direct called The Ghost of Slumber Mountain. Brown, who was increasingly aware that his hardscrabble life of prospecting now offered fiscal rewards beyond the frontier, readily agreed, and tutored O’Brien in subjects ranging from how dinosaurs likely moved their bodies to how they traveled in packs. With his input, O’Brien captured the most realistic dinosaurs yet displayed on film. In the story, a man named Uncle Jack tells his nephews a tale of seeing prehistoric creatures through a magical telescope carried by a man named Mad Dick. When The Ghost of Slumber Mountain came out, its special effects outshone all of its human stars (including O’Brien, who decided to play Mad Dick himself). Advertisements plastered across the country tempted audiences to come see as “These giant monsters of the past are seen to breathe, to live again, to move and battle as they did at the dawn of life!” The film’s climax featured a battle between a T. rex and a Triceratops, the first time that a T. rex was a screen villain. The film brought in slightly more than $1.8 million in today’s dollars, a profit more than thirty-three times the cost of its production.
That taste of success ramped up O’Brien’s ambitions. Over the next seven years, he toiled away on an adaptation of Conan Doyle’s novel The Lost World. It was the first full-length film to pair human actors with stop-motion dinosaurs, fulfilling every child’s fantasy. In a publicity stunt, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle screened clips from the not-yet-completed film to an audience that included Harry Houdini at a meeting of the Society of American Magicians in New York. Conan Doyle, whose faith in the supernatural led him to consult fortune-tellers and believe that fairies existed, initially refused to say whether the dinosaurs in the film were simply special effects. In private, he admitted to Houdini that “In presenting my moving dinosaurs I had to walk warily in my speech, so as to preserve the glamour and yet say nothing which I could not justify as literally true. . . . I could not resist the temptation to surprise your associates and guests. I am sure you will forgive me if for a few short hours I had them guessing.”
When the film premiered in 1925, it featured scenes so lifelike that some audience members believed the dinosaurs were real. Herds stampede; a pterodactyl strips meat from a fresh kill; a bullet wound in the flesh of an allosaur appears to gush blood. O’Brien again featured a T. rex as the ultimate monster, replacing the allosaur in Conan Doyle’s original text. For a model, he drew from Charles Knight’s painting in the American Museum. Where other dinosaurs grapple and battle, the film’s T. rex is so fierce that it first rips off the leg of its prey and then begins eating it alive. The film’s popularity made it the archetype for monster movies, with the T. rex as the star. In a review, the New York Times noted that “some of the scenes are as awesome as anything that has ever been shown in shadow form.” The Lost World became the first commercial film to be shown as in-flight entertainment on an airplane, distracting passengers on a flight that left London’s Croydon Aerodrome in April of that year.
Among those who watched the film was Merian C. Cooper, a former Air Force pilot who escaped from a prisoner-of-war camp and returned to civilian life with a plan to join the nascent motion picture business. While working at RKO Studios in Hollywood, he came across a soundstage featuring O’Brien’s models of dinosaurs and decided to jettison a project he was working on about baboons and instead focus on an idea in which a giant ape fights a Tyrannosaurus. The completed film, by then known as King Kong, appeared in 1933 and proved a huge success, pulling in more than $1.5 million in today’s dollars during its first weekend despite the ongoing Great Depression. More than six thousand movie-goers attended each sold-out showing at the newly-opened Radio City Music Hall, where audience members could be heard yelling and whistling when Kong faces down the T. rex before being kidnapped and brought to New York. “Human beings seem so small that one is reminded of Defoe’s ‘Gulliver’s Travels’,” noted the New York Times in a review of the film.
Brown made his first trip to Hollywood a few years later after receiving a call from Walt Disney, who planned to follow the commercial success of Mickey Mouse and Snow White with a film that he expected to “change the history of motion pictures.” He asked Brown to educate animators at his studio about everything associated with dinosaurs, from different geological formations to the relationships between various species to the most up-to-date theories on why and how they became extinct. When Brown traveled out to Hollywood to give his thoughts on models and scenes sketched out for the upcoming film, he “found their walls covered with very credible and accurate types of prehistoric life including the associated floras,” he later said in a lecture to the New York Academy of Sciences.
The finished product appeared in November 1940 as a segment of Disney’s masterpiece, Fantasia. The film’s narrator explains that audiences will soon see “a coldly accurate reproduction of what science thinks went on during the first few billion years of this planet’s existence.” As an orchestra plays Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, microscopic blobs split, sea creatures form and dinosaurs appear on a rugged, unsettled planet. Suddenly, rain begins to fall and a herd of herbivores look up to see a T. rex coming for them as lightning crashes behind it. It catches up to a Stegosaurus, which fights it off with its spiked tail until the T. rex bites its neck, killing it. The other dinosaurs leave as the T. rex begins to devour its prey. Soon, however, the swampy world of the T. rex is replaced by a parched land full of downed trees and mud, and then only footprints leading to fossils. The segment offered millions of children their first impression of dinosaurs, centering the action on the power and relentlessness of the animal that still awed visitors daily at the American Museum.
Unlike anything else found in a natural history museum, the T. rex morphed into a staple of popular culture. In the pages of comic books Superman fought one, Wonder Woman rode one and Batman captured a mechanical one and kept it as a souvenir in the Batcave. At the Chicago World’s Fair, an animatronic T. rex stood in the center of an exhibit sponsored by the Sinclair Oil Company, its gleaming rows of teeth terrifying young and old alike. In whatever form it took, the instinctive fear that the creature conjured—a feat unmatched by specimens of larger herbivores—made it a magnet, holding an audience’s attention long enough to build a popular acceptance of concepts ranging from geology to the first mainstream depictions of climate change.
Brown would often remark that nothing else he had done in life came anywhere close to its importance. His association with the species led to appearances on radio shows and television, turning him into one of the first celebrity scientists. Each week, millions heard lectures he delivered on CBS Radio, while millions more each year viewed the specimens he had uncovered, a combination which seemed to fulfill a prophecy of showmanship handed down from his namesake, P. T. Barnum.
For all of the attention the T. rex brought him, there was one audience whom Brown continually shut out. As she grew into a young woman, Frances knew her father only through his absence, and believed that his silence signaled that he was still alive. Her faith was often rewarded. After receiving no communications from him for a month during a mission searching for oil in what is now Ethiopia, the Anglo-American Oil Company presumed he was dead. “When the oil company had given up hope for its explorers’ survival, the museum felt that it must pass this sad information along. Fortunately, Barnum’s young daughter did not believe a word of it,” Frances later wrote. During the trip, a French woman with whom Brown may have been having an affair learned of Frances’s existence and gave him a medieval Coptic cross made of brass to give to his daughter. Brown held on to it for many years, passing it on to Frances only after she became an adult.
As a child, Frances often wrote to the American Museum seeking information about her father. Once, she asked for a private tour of Brown’s discoveries, as if by spending time with them she could understand what was so compelling that it made him cast her aside. W. D. Matthew, the head of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, replied that he would take “great pleasure [in meeting] the daughter of my old friend and associate and I shall not delegate to anyone else the privilege of showing her around a bit.” Matthew wrote a short note to Brown in the field whenever Frances visited the museum, each time forcing the present into the deep past.
It would take the start of another world war—and Brown’s fears that the T. rex might be destroyed—to bring the two halves of his life together.