Hatcher and the Quarry Map, 1901
In 1899 and 1900, teams from the recently founded Carnegie Museum discovered two nearly complete Diplodocus skeletons in Sheep Creek, Wyoming. Hatcher, who had left Marsh's employ and now worked for Andrew Carnegie, named the new species Diplodocus carnegiei, after his patron, and his monograph tells the full story of the discoveries, with thirteen plates that show, among other things, each of the forty-one vertebrae recovered from the type specimen. The final plate is a large foldout with a complete skeletal restoration. At 1/30 natural size, the restored skeleton is around 26" long, and it has often been reprinted.
But in some ways the first plate in the monograph is even more remarkable, in spite of its plain appearance and prosaic caption: "Diagram of Quarry C. Showing positions of skeletons 84 and 94." Hatcher here introduced a new kind of visual image into the arsenal of the paleontologist: the quarry map. It shows the exact positions of the bones of the two Diplodocus skeletons as they lay when discovered, and also shows the scattered bones of other species, such as Stegosaurus and Brontosaurus. The quarry map would soon become a standard feature of dinosaur monographs.
This is believed to be the earliest known quarry map of a dinosaur excavation. Two Diplodocus specimens are mapped here; when excavated, these two specimens made up the composite Diplodocus carnegiei that was mounted at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in 1901. The Carnegie mount of Diplodocus would soon become one of the best known in the world, when casts of the skeleton were distributed to museums in Europe and America.
The Diplodocus carnegiei Skeleton, 1901
The Diplodocus at the Carnegie Museum was the first sauropod skeleton to be mounted. A.S. Coggeshall, who was one of the co-discoverers of the first specimen in 1899, was in charge of the mount, and he had to devise a special steel framework to support it. This restoration inspired the American Museum of Natural History in New York to attempt a similar mount of their Brontosaurus, which was a much more difficult task, and was not completed until 1905.
Carnegie’s Diplodocus in the British Museum, 1905
When King Edward VII of England visited Andrew Carnegie’s castle in Scotland, he saw a picture of the recently mounted Diplodocus carnegiei in Pittsburgh, and he supposedly asked for a replica for the British Museum. Carnegie obliged, commissioning molds from the original bones and producing five full-sized plaster replicas of “Dippy.” The first of these was presented to the British Museum in 1905 in a grand ceremony; the other replicas later went to Italy, Austria, Germany, and France.