Monsters of the Past

Earl Douglass

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 (pictured at right) 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.

The video clips shown here are from Monsters of the Past, a 1922 silent film that chronicles the fieldwork of Carnegie Museum of Natural History paleontologists at Dinosaur National Monument. The film features such paleontological luminaries as Earl Douglass, O.A. Peterson, Arthur Coggeshall, and J. Leroy Kay.

	Monsters of the Past (Clip One) 160x120, Sorenson 3 @ 10 FPS 02:00 minutes 2.4 megs Finding and exposing a fossil.
	Monsters of the Past (Clip Two) 160x120, Sorenson 3 @ 10 FPS 02:00 minutes 2.7 megs Extracting the fossil.
	Monsters of the Past (Clip Three) 160x120, Sorenson 3 @ 10 FPS 02:00 minutes 3.1 megs Extracting the fossil (continued).
	Monsters of the Past (Clip Four) 160x120, Sorenson 3 @ 10 FPS 02:00 minutes 2.1 megs Preparing the fossil for relocation to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
	Monsters of the Past (Clip Five) 160x120, Sorenson 3 @ 10 FPS 02:00 minutes 1.7 megs Extracting the fossil from the matrix.
	Monsters of the Past (Clip Six) 160x120, Sorenson 3 @ 10 FPS 02:19 minutes 1.9 megs Preparation is finished, and the results are placed on display.
	Monsters of the Past (Full Movie) 160x120, Sorenson 3 @ 10 FPS 16:33 minutes 19.3 megs The entire fossil hunting, extracting, and preparation process, from beginning to end.

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