Brown, William Adams. Morris Ketchum Jesup, A Character Sketch. New York: Privately printed, 1910.
Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1881–.
Chapman, Frank M. Biographical Memoir Joel Asaph Allen. Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. XXI, Washington, D.C.: 1927.
Chapman, Frank M. Autobiography of a Bird Lover. New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1933.
Curator Quarterly. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1958–.
Dybas, Henry S. Two New Genera of Feather-Wing Beetles from the Eastern United States. Chicago: Field Museum of Natural History, 1961.
Gratacap, Louis P. The History of the American Museum of Natural History. Unpublished MS, Rare Book Room, American Museum of Natural History, n.d.
Green, Fitzhugh. Field journal 1913–1915. Crocker Land Expedition. Unpublished, Rare Book Room, American Museum of Natural History.
Green, Fitzhugh. Arctic Duty with the Crocker Land Expedition. Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, Vol. 43, Nos. 175–178; Vol. 44, No. 179. Washington, D.C.: 1914–1918.
Hellman, Geoffrey. Bankers, Bones and Beetles: The First Century of the American Museum of Natural History. Garden City: The Natural History Press, 1968.
Henson, Matthew A. A Negro Explorer at the North Pole. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, n.d.
Jochelson, Waldemar. Peoples of Asiatic Russia. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1928.
Jochelson, Waldemar. The Yukaghir and the Yukaghirized Tungus. New York: American Museum of Natural History, 1910.
Kennedy, John Michael. Philanthropy and Science in New York City: The American Museum of Natural History. New Haven: Unpublished Dissertation from Yale University, 1968.
Kinsey, Alfred C. The Origin of the Higher Category in Cynips. Bloomington: Indiana University Publications, Science Series NO.4, 1936.
Kuhn, Allen Dale. "How We Stole the Star of India." True magazine, 1965.
Lapidary Journal. Los Angeles: 1947–.
MacMillan, Donald B. Field journal and geographical reports. Unpublished, Rare Book Room, American Museum of Natural History, 1914–1919.
MacMillan, Donald B. Four Years in the White North. New York: Harper and Bros., 1918.
MacMillan, Donald B. "In Search of a New Land." Harper's Magazine, Vol CXXXI, Nos. 785–786, 1915.
Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History. New York, 1893–1930.
Mineralogical Record. Bowie, MD: 1970–.
Morden, William James. Across Asia's Snows and Deserts. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1927.
Natural History magazine, 1919–. New York: American Museum of Natural History.
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Osborn, Henry Fairfield. Cope: Master Naturalist. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1931.
Ostrom, John H. and John S. McIntosh. Marsh's Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966.
Peary, Josephine Diebitsch. My Aretic Journal. New York: Contemporary Publishing Co., 1893.
Peary, Robert E. Log book on board the S.S. Hope from St. Johns to Greenland commanded by Capt. John Bartlett, commencing July 10, 1896, on unsuccessful voyage by Robert E. Peary to secure the meteorite Ahnighito. Rare Book Room, American Museum of Natural History, 1896.
Peary, Robert E. Northward Over the Great Ice. New York: Frederick A. Stokes, 1896.
Peary, Robert E. "The Value of Arctic Exploration." National Geographic magazine, 1903.
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Footnotes
Part One
*1 Homo sapiens was lacking a type specimen until one waggish zoologist proclaimed his body as the type for the human species and issued directions that his body be preserved after death for the edification of future scientists.
Chapter 1
*2 On opening night. a dinner was held for twenty-one people in the belly of one of the iguanodons. The invitations were sent on an artificial pterodactyl wing, and the scientists at the dinner reportedly got so drunk that their boisterous singing could be heard across the entire park.
Chapter 2
*3 On his way east, Bickmore stopped in England and showed his plan to Sir Richard Owen, who was at that time planning the British Museum (Natural History). Owen and Bickmore pored over each other's plans and each borrowed ideas from the other.
*4 The time capsule consisted of a copper box containing a dozen New York newspapers, and some magazines, coins, reports, and other historical flotsam. As the Museum complex grew over the years, the location of the cornerstone was lost, and the time capsule, due to be opened in the 1920S, remained sealed. It wasn't until the Museum's centennial in 1969 that a diligent search finally turned it up. When the time capsule was opened, it was discovered that water had more or less destroyed Its contents.
†5 The building was named after the remote Western state because its uptown location was considered equally remote.
Chapter 3
*6 Laufer even tried to obtain the heads of executed criminals to aid the research of physical anthropologists at the Museum.
Chapter 4
*7 Throughout this chapter and those that follow, I have mostly used the explorers' phonetic spellings of Eskimo names, instead of their Greenlandic spellings, to avoid confusing the reader when those names appear in diary and article extracts. For this same reason, I have commonly made use throughout the book of place names contemporaneous with the periods involved, as opposed to the names by which they are known today.
*8 I have been unable to find his initial on the meteorite, which is now on display in the Museum's Hall of Meteorites.
†9 Scientists know that all three came from the same shower because they possess identical chemical composition and crystalline properties. The three irons originated as a single mass that struck the earth's upper atmosphere and exploded, sending the pieces slamming into an ice sheet. As the sheet retreated, it deposited the pieces on the ground. Since Peary'! day, smaller pieces from the same shower have also been found.
*10 Although the Ahnighito is still the largest meteorite ever recovered, a larger one does exist in the deserts of South Africa. Called the Hoba, it has never been fully excavated and is estimated to weigh nearly twice as much as the Ahnighito.
Chapter 5
*11 The Eskimo, MacMillan wrote, were "mortally afraid of having their feet frostbitten, nursing them as tenderly as a mother would her youngest child."
*12 In the Arctic, Eskimo dogs allow themselves to be buried by drifting snow during a storm, which collects about them and provides insulation. If the snow gets too deep, howe
ver, the dogs will suffocate.
Chapter 6
*13 Elasmosaurus was a long-necked. long-railed marine reptile. and the specimen Cope was using was incomplete. The mistake was nor as egregious as it may sound.
*14 Henry Fairfield Osborn, who was then a vertebrate paleontologist at the Museum, sided with Cope, which of course made him an enemy of Marsh.
*15 Many rich fossil beds were once areas where rivers or flash floods washed bones into a bank or eddy. Large numbers of bones could collect in such spots over many years before they were finally buried in silt and fossilized. Such spots are easily recognized; they usually occur in ancient, crossbedded channel sands. The hones themselves often show abrasion from being swept downstream, and few articulated bones are found in such localities.
*16 Dinosaurs were sometimes found with their necks arched and contorted, which paleontologists believe is caused by the drying and shrinking of powerful tendons.
Chapter 7
*17 The cost of creating the African Hall dioramas was staggering. Akeley had budgeted $25.000 for each small group. and $50,000 for each large one—costs that did not include securing the specimens in Africa. Today, even if one could create these extraordinary habitat groups, the costs would be somewhere in the vicinity of a half-million dollars each.
†18 It was later renamed the Akeley-Eastman-Pomeroy African Expedition by Akeley's wife.
Chapter 8
*19 Before the days of plate tectonics and continental drift, this was thought to be the only dispersal route of fauna from the Old World to the New.
*20 These two blocks were carefully transported across Mongolia, defended from bandits, carried into China. loaded on a steamer. and shipped to New York. They arrived at the Museum December 19, 1922. When Osborn opened the two blocks, he found they contained an extraordinarily fine skull; the only Baluchitherium skull yet found. He wrote that the discovery and transportation of this skull halfway around the world was one of the greatest events in the history of paleontology.
*21 The eggs did bring grief from an unexpected quarter. When Andrews returned to the States the following winter to raise more money for the expedition, he was amazed at popular interest in the eggs. As a fund-raising stunt, he decided to "auction off" an extraneous egg. Spirited bidding followed, with Colonel Austin Colgate winning out with a $5,000 bid (he gave the egg to Colgate University.) Unfortunately, the Chinese and Mongolians got wind of the auction and thought that each dinosaur egg was actually worth $5,000. Here was proof that the Americans, just as they had suspected, were plundering their country of priceless treasures. This was one of many factors that led to the cancellation of the expedition years
*22 Placental mammals are characterized by young that develop fully in the womb, nourished by the placenta. Marsupial mammals (such as the kangaroo) bear their young after a short gestation period, and the young develop in the mother's pouch. The true significance of Andrews' discovery wasn't that mammals lived during the Cretaceous, but that they had already evolved into two distinct groups at such an early date. It implied that mammals were a lot older than had been thought.
*23 It is ironic that the only time Andrews was actually shot, it was by his own hand. In 1928, he shot himself in the leg while drawing his revolver.
†24 The Buriats were the dominant Mongol tribes, to whom the Russians had given bureaucratic control of Outer Mongolia when they "helped" the Mongolians throw off the Chinese yoke during the Mongolian revolution.
Chapter 9
*25 Of course, anyone who has followed the recent developments in evolutionary theory realizes just how mistaken this belief was—as mistaken as Lord Kelvin when he claimed several years before Einstein appeared that virtually all of the problems in physics had been solved, and that future researchers would merely be adding digits to the right of the decimal point.
*26 A total of seventy to eighty scientists studied Neblina in a series of team visits.
Chapter 10
*27 Those who study dinosaurs are not so fortunate. Reptilian teeth increase in size as the animal grows, and thus become a much poorer way to identify a species. Reptilian teeth are for the most part shaped like simple Cones, making it impossible to identify a species from its teeth.
*28 It is important to note that McKenna doesn't dispute the asteroid-impact theory per se; he merely contends that the dinosaurs were extinct before the asteroid struck.
†29 A bolide is a large meteoroid that either explodes in the atmosphere or strikes the earth, or both.
*30 In the days before the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulated the use of hazardous chemicals, Museum preparators often placed the skeleton in a shallow tray filled with benzene, which, when placed in strong sunlight, turned the bones a brilliant white.
†31 Although the foregoing methods may seem bizarre, they have been standard procedure in most natural history museums and large universities for many years.
*32 Jumbo lived only three more years after his arrival in America, so that would work out to an unlikely one thousand a day. Since Barnum tainted any facts he came in contact with, most of the stories about Jumbo are suspect.
*33 For an explanation of type specimens, see page 6. It was later concluded that Jumbo did not represent a new species, but only a variant of an already known species. He was, alas, reduced to a subspecies, a much less important designation.
*34 The excavation was immortalized by Peale in a painting showing the beast being taken out of its pit, bone by bone. For years, Peale exhibited the mounted skeleton in his museum in Philadelphia. The skeleton was later lost—God knows how—and remains missing to this day.
*35 A number of mastodons and mammoths were mounted with their tusks reversed in the nineteenth century, all based on an erroneous mounting done by the Russians in St. Petersburg. The Warren mounting, of which an illustration still exists. was probably based on the St. Petersburg mount.
Chapter 11
*36 This collection of rats represents most of the species of Rattus in the world and is a highly important series from a scientific standpoint.
*37 Many people erroneously think of evolution as a path from extinct animals to living animals, with humans at the top. Actually, evolution is thought in terms of relatedness more than progression.
*38 The excruciatingly slow elevators in the museum are infamous.
†39 One of our librarians told me that on one occasion, several guards were discreetly poking around an office in the library looking for "a big black snake." The snake was reportedly found in the basement, quite a bit fatter from a plentiful diet of mice.
††40 Since the placement of this exhibition label, this animal has been renamed Pan troglodytes.
*41 This corridor, stretching a long West Side block, is alleged to be the longest straight corridor in New York City.
Chapter 12
*42 And most insects are beetles. Thus, an alien visitor to our planet could accurately report back that animal life on earth consists of beetles, with a few strange variants.
Chapter 13
*43 One of the favorite resting spots for the frogs is inside the skull's eye sockets.
*44 The Greek word herpeton, from herpo, to creep. denoted something that crawled; herpetology is the science that embraces reptiles and amphibians.
Chapter 14
*45 Rothschild's father had disinherited him, according to Walter, because he had not gone into the family banking business, but his father could not deprive him of his title and estates.
*46 The tree was to go in the middle of the hall, surrounded by a bit of its native habitat, but the exhibition department truncated the exhibit and today only the crown is on display in a case.
Chapter 15
*47 The Koryak called the constellation Ursa Major "The Wild Reindeer Buck"; their name for the Morning Star was "Suspended Breath," and they called the Milky Way, "Clay River."
*48 We know that most of the warriors depicted are young because
their clothing is unadorned and their shirts are of white manufacture.
*49 Anthropologists made life casts of the faces, and then sculpted the eyes, hair, ornaments, and shoulders to make a conventional bust portrait.
*50 This practice of making life casts—often by attaching real but ethnically incorrect bodies to correct faces—continues to this day. In the Asian Hall, the faces of several nineteenth century Yakut are attached to casts made from the body of a young curatorial assistant in the Anthropology Department. Another figure was made out of the head and hands of a Buddhist monk who is still very much alive.
Chapter 17
*51 The diamonds were discovered by a gem expert at Tiffany's when his cutting blade was stopped by a small inclusion while he was slicing the meteorite. He found many such inclusions, and to test whether they were indeed diamonds, he removed one, pulverized it, and cemented the dust to a gem-faceting wheel. He then tried to facet a diamond with the wheel, as diamond dust is the only material that is hard enough to facet a diamond. As he touched the diamond to the wheel, he heard that "peculiar singing sound" which can only be made by a diamond cutting another diamond.
*52 A meteor is a bit of extraterrestrial material that burns up in the earth's atmosphere. If it reaches the ground it becomes a meteorite, While in outer space, these objects are referred to as meteoroids, or asteroids if they are very large. A meteoroid that explodes while streaking through the earth's atmosphere is called a bolide.
*53 This humming or singing noise is often noted by witnesses. It is caused by the irregular fragments spinning rapidly as they descend.
*54 Meteorites, like most metallic objects, rust. It takes anywhere from several thousand to a million years for an iron meteorite to rust into a brown pile of shingles. The meteorites that have survived the longest on the earth come from Antarctica, where they have been frozen for 900,000 years.
*55 This pit was so large that half a century later a Museum curator visited the site and reported that the hole was still there, sprinkled with rusty iron shingles and flakes.
*56 An electron microprobe is a device that determines the composition of a specimen by bombarding it with a beam of electrons.
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