Welcome to our Splendid Past

Andrew Carnegie was a man who thought big. When dinosaur fever struck the world in the late 1800s, he knew he had to have one of these mysterious beasts for his museum in Pittsburgh. Carnegie dispatched a team of scientists to travel to Wyoming with a single mission: to get a dinosaur for Pittsburgh. From the well-preserved bones that were sent back to Pittsburgh, paleontologist John Bell Hatcher described a new species, Diplodocus carnegii.

In 1909 in Utah, Carnegie Museum’s Earl Douglass made one of the greatest discoveries in the history of paleontology — the Carnegie Quarry.

These were the first in a long succession of groundbreaking discoveries supported by Andrew Carnegie. Legendary curators and field collectors went on expeditions that brought back some of Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s most famous dinosaur specimens, such as Apatosaurus, Triceratops, Stegosaurus, and Allosaurus — dinosaur originals that grace our museum’s hall to this day.

Click to learn about the historic excavations of Diplodocus and Apatosaurus

Click to view clips of the black and white movie Monsters of the Past