Editor’s note: This is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the December 1940 issue of Carnegie magazine about three dinosaurs—Stegosaurus, Camptosaurus, and Dryosaurus—that had been recently put on display. All three were discovered during a museum field expedition to Dinosaur National Monument in northeastern Utah and can still be seen in the museum’s Dinosaurs in Their Time exhibition.

Of the many kinds of dinosaurs found, the oddest of the lot is the Stegosaurus, or armored dinosaur, which is twenty-one feet long, stands nine and one-half feet at its highest point, and must have had at least the robust weight of the largest of living elephants. Unlike the Camptosaurus and Dryosaurus, it was a quadruped; and although the massive front limbs were short, it walked on all four feet. The hind limbs were long, giving the vertebrae of the back a steep slope toward the front. This characteristic, with the backward sloping tail, gave the animal its sharply arched vertebral column. The front parts of the jaws of the Stegosaurus were toothless, and what small teeth it did have in the back of its mouth could not be seen from the outside at all.

The most conspicuous peculiarity of this bizarre and fantastic animal, however, is the structure of large bony plates rising massively along the spinal column and terminating in large bristling spines or spikes more than two feet long near the end of the tail. This dermal armor is arranged in two alternating rows projecting upward and slightly outward. On the sides of the plates are well-developed blood-vessel impressions indicating that they were covered with closely fitting skin. In the region of the throat, at least, there were closely packed, small, rounded ossicles protecting that part of the body.

Another very unusual characteristic of the Stegosaurus was its central nervous system. The brain was very small; in fact, the smallest ever known relative to the size of the animal. Passing backward along the neural canal to the sacrum, one finds an enlargement many times that of the brain cavity: probably a coordinating center for the control of the massive hind parts of the body. As Bert Leston Taylor says in The Dinosaur:

Behold the mighty dinosaur, 

Famous in prehistoric lore, 

Not only for his weight and strength 

But for his intellectual length. 

You will observe by these remains 

The creature had two sets of brains 

One in his head (the usual place)

The other at his spinal base. 

Thus he could reason a priori 

As well as a posteriori. 

No problem bothered him a bit. 

He made both head and tail to it.

So wise he was, so wise and solemn, 

Each thought filled just a spinal column,

If one brain found the pressure strong 

It passed a few ideas along;

If something slipped his forward mind 

‘Twas rescued by the one behind;

And if in error he was caught 

He had a saving afterthought.

As he thought twice before he spoke 

He had no judgments to revoke;

For he could think without congestion, 

Upon both sides of every question

Oh, gaze upon this model beast 

Defunct ten million years at least.

Read the full article. 

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I have long expected that anthropologists would find in some cavern frequented by early man a mysterious assemblage of objects tucked away in a stygian niche. These would be categorized according to standard procedure, as ceremonial objects, the catchall designation for all artifacts whose true function evades explanation. I can even forecast some of the items that would be represented in the horde, with exact composition somewhat varied by location—a piece of veined quartz, a concretion, several sea shells, an iron nodule, perhaps a gold nugget or piece of amber. And being ancient enough to remember traveler’s curiosa in corner whatnots in Victorian parlors, I can second-guess young anthropologists and assert that early man, like his descendants ever since, suffered from pack-ratting.

The collecting urge is most catholic and unrestrained in childhood. In many persons it becomes submerged during school years and pursuit of a living. Some individuals achieve wealth and then begin to amass the great personal collections of art, books, or whatever that eventually enhance entire galleries in great museums; others, less affluent, specialize in inexpensive or yet unappreciated materials—the rubbish collector who salvaged Toby jugs, the visionaries who saved samples of barbed wire, the much traveled scientist who saved air-sickness bags—intriguing examples could be multiplied geometrically. Finally, there is a much smaller group so infected by the collecting urge that they jump from childhood into professional collecting with scant concern for their future—they become curators, or keepers of collections, and eschew both high salaries and the chance of selling personally assembled collections at greatly appreciated values.

Curators, however, and some advanced amateurs, for whom collections are the prime focus of daily life, rather than an off-hours hobby, have the rewarding satisfaction of utilizing collections for a variety of scholarly and research purposes of inestimable value to society. Any large grouping of related but dissimilar objects, either products of nature or works of man, may impress the eye, but no collection achieves its ultimate potential until it is studied and interpreted by successive generations of scholars.

For many years, I had the personal delight of adding to the herpetological collections of Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and studying and publishing upon some aspects of these collections. Then I had the administrative responsibility for the museum as a whole and the new challenge of finding support for the orderly growth of all the collections and their utilization for research, exhibition, and education.

Now I am engaged as a volunteer in assembling a relatively new collection and also in preserving some remnants of the museum’s history. Unlike other collections of the museum, vast in scope and internationally recognized, both the collection of nature portraits and the archival materials have only incipient greatness. They have already proved useful in many ways—for public exhibitions here and in other institutions, for illustrations in publications, and as source material for articles and lectures. They will not become truly significant, however, until artists and illustrators feel that they must contribute examples of their work in order to be represented, and until donors give or bequeath paintings, photographs, or memorabilia that cry for the long-term custody and scholarly utilization that only a museum can provide.

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