Carnegie Museum of Natural History
One of the Four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh
Take a Free Tour on the Weekends
Join our expert Natural History Interpreters for public tours, free with admission. See highlights of favorite exhibitions, learn fun facts, and have your burning questions answered. Tours meet on Saturdays and Sundays at 12:30 p.m. at the entrance to Dinosaurs in Their Time.
Meet at the entrance to Dinosaurs in Their Time.
Tours will run on Saturdays and Sundays through the month of August.
By John Wible
William J. Holland, Director of the Carnegie Museum, announced a new publication series, the Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum, by stating … “To the fame of Pittsburgh as the seat of some of the most Cyclopean industries of the age is being added reputation as a seat of learning. Under the cloud of smoke, which attests the industry of her inhabitants, and is the sign of her material prosperity, live men who find their pleasure in exploring the wonders of the material universe, and the record of their discoveries and researches will be from year to year be found.”
The very first number of this new series was published in July 1901. It announced the discovery of a new species of dinosaur, Diplodocus carnegii, which staff paleontologist John Bell Hatcher named for the museum’s founder, Andrew Carnegie. Hatcher’s 63-page text included a bone-by-bone description of two skeletons collected in 1899 and 1900 from the same quarry in Sheep Creek, Wyoming. Given the number of vertebrae (backbones), most of the text is about them!
Hatcher restored the skeleton in a pose “the animal must have frequently assumed when feeding upon the soft and succulent plants that grew in abundance along the shores of the shallow waters about and in which these Dinosaurs lived” (p. 57).
This is the pose for Dippy that most Pittsburghers will remember in the old dinosaur hall.
In fact, many museum goers around the world know the same pose because Andrew Carnegie donated casts of Diplodocus carnegii to the major museums in Europe, Mexico, and Argentina. The Pittsburgh mount changed in 2007 to bring it up-to-date with current scientific knowledge. To see the updated pose, you will have to come visit the museum.
John Wible, PhD, is the curator of the Section of Mammals at Carnegie Museum of Natural History and editor of Annals of Carnegie Museum. John’s research is focused on the tree of life of mammals, understanding the evolutionary relationships between living and extinct taxa, and how the mammalian fauna on Earth got to be the way it is today. He uses his expertise on the anatomy of living mammals to reconstruct the lifeways of extinct mammals. John lives with his wife and two sons in a house full of cats and rabbits in Ross Township. Museum employees are encouraged to blog about their unique experiences and knowledge gained from working at the museum.
By Anna Weber
Did you know that the ever-popular Dippy the Dinosaur and the American state may or may not share a birthday of sorts? That’s right: though Diplodocus carnegii lived hundreds of millions of years ago, Dippy the fossil was unearthed in Sheep Creek, Wyoming on one of the first days of July 1899. But how did Dippy end up in Pittsburgh, and why was this species named after Andrew Carnegie?
One hundred years ago, if you were a steel magnate, you were also a collector and an investor. You collected or invested in art, real estate and houses, cars, or perhaps even dinosaurs. The expedition that unearthed Dippy was funded by Carnegie, and paleontologist John Bell Hatcher named the new species in honor of the investor himself. When King Edward VII of England expressed an interest to Carnegie in acquiring a replica for what was then called the British Museum of Natural History in London, so launched a business of replicating Dippy the more-than-80-foot dinosaur for museums worldwide.
Why had Carnegie been so interested in getting his hands on his very own dinosaur? Forever interested in evolution and Darwin, Carnegie wanted to continue learning about the natural world and provide this education to the greater Pittsburgh community in order to help all of us better understand our own evolution as humans. In addition, sharing the knowledge derived from the digs, as well as sharing the literal skeletons and fossils, helped foster better diplomacy between the US and other nations.
Carnegie’s dino fervor fueled a facet of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History for which it is still known. Today, Pittsburgh has one of the largest dinosaur collections in the United States, including the holotype of the T. Rex, meaning the first fossil of the world’s most famous dinosaur. As a nod to the museum’s renown, in the movie Silence of the Lambs, Clarice Starling (played by Jodie Foster) walks past a T. Rex skeleton when she visits an etymologist in order to identify the moth.
As you may have noticed, lawns, squares, courtyards, and foyers around the city are graced with statues of T. Rexes, Triceratopses, and Stegosauruses in homage to the Carnegie Museum’s collection. Walk the Burgh and Bike the Burgh’s downtown tours introduce walkers to several of these statues: a T. Rex wearing paintings of excavations, a Stegosaurus made of glass, and a Triceratops in the shape of a Heinz Ketchup bottle. Bike the Burgh also has a tour called “From Oakland to East Liberty: Land of Barons and Bankers,” which explores the “city beautiful” architecture of Oakland, including that of the Carnegie Museum itself. And on Walk the Burgh’s “Discover Oakland” tour, we’ll teach you more about Carnegie, the museums, and Diplodocus carnegii. If you come along, we can wave hello to the Dippy statue near Schenley Plaza as we bike or walk by.
Check out more facts about Dippy and our other dinosaurs on the Carnegie Museum of Natural History’s website, and check out more details about Walk the Burgh and Bike the Burgh’s tours at their sites, too.
Anna Weber is the Marketing and Outreach Coordinator for Bike the Burgh and Walk the Burgh Tours. She is working towards an MFA in creative nonfiction at Pitt.
While Dippy (Diplodocus carnegii) was making his grand debut in Pittsburgh, he caught the attention of a king across the ocean. King Edward VII asked Andrew Carnegie for a dinosaur for England. Dr. William Holland, the director of Carnegie Museum of Natural History, suggested that the museum could give the king a cast—a copy made from plaster.
Under the supervision of Carnegie scientists, the Diplodocus carnegii model was erected in the Natural History Museum in London.
But Dippy’s popularity overseas did not stop there. Governments of many nations asked Carnegie if they could have their own copies. One cast famously premiered in the National Museum of Natural History in Paris to cries of “Vive la Dippy!”
Today, replicas of Dippy stand in the national museums of Germany, Italy, France, Austria, Russia, Spain, Argentina, and Mexico. Even Carnegie Museum of Natural History made a life-size statue of Dippy that stands on Forbes Avenue outside of the museum in 1999. You might know him from the fun scarves he wears!
Of course, the original Dippy still calls Carnegie Museum of Natural History home and remains the most famous piece of our massive collection.
