Diplodocus
Cast presented in 1908; original fossil Late Jurassic, about one hundred and fifty million years old
Climb the stairs to the first floor and the palaeontology hall opens up in front of you, dominated by the long neck and whiplash tail of a Diplodocus stretching down the middle of the room. It is a plaster cast, not the original bones, but it is a cast with a history. In 1908 the Scottish American steel magnate Andrew Carnegie presented it to the French president, one of a series of copies of the skeleton from his museum in Pittsburgh that he sent to the great capitals of Europe and the Americas. Dippy, as the London copy was nicknamed, made Diplodocus the first dinosaur celebrity.
Walk the length of the animal. The skull is tiny, no bigger than a horse's, with peg shaped teeth at the front of the jaws for stripping leaves. The neck is made of long hollow vertebrae, and the tail contains around eighty bones, tapering to a thin whip that may have been cracked to frighten predators. The feet are broad and the whole animal, from nose to tail tip, is longer than two buses. The original was found in Wyoming in 1899 and belongs to a species named in Carnegie's honour, Diplodocus carnegii.
Around the Diplodocus the hall continues in nineteenth century style, with skeletons of fossil mammals, marine reptiles and other dinosaurs on open plinths and in glass cases. Casts like this one were how most people, and most scientists, first saw a complete dinosaur, and the Paris copy has stood in the same spot for more than a century. Look at the mounting: the iron supports are Edwardian engineering, and the pose, tail dragging on the ground, reflects the ideas of 1908 rather than the raised tail that palaeontologists now favour.
Did You Know? Carnegie sent casts of the same skeleton to London, Berlin, Vienna, Bologna, Saint Petersburg, Madrid, Mexico City and La Plata as well as Paris, a kind of dinosaur diplomacy.
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