During the field season of 1892, J.L. Wortman found the front half of an absolutely monstrous mammal. Entombed in the South Dakota sediment was the exquisitely preserved front half of a Titanotherium (now called Brontotherium, as far as I've been able to tell), an odd-toed ungulate that looked something like a rhino despite its closer affinity to horses. Much to the disappointment of Wortman and his assistant O.A. Peterson, however, the hips, hind limbs, and tail of the creature seemed to be eroded away, and a dedicated search in the summer of 1894 for the remainder of the skeleton turned up only a few limb elements.
In an occurrence of cooperation that ran counter to the accusations of bone-stealing and claim-jumping made by Cope and Marsh during the heyday of the "Bone Wars" a few years earlier, however, a team from Princeton led by John Bell Hatcher and J.W. Gidley helped Wortman and Peterson "secure"* a pelvis and two femurs that the university team had already collected to fill in the gaps. When all the parts found their way back to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the head preparator of the Vertebrate Paleontology Department, Adam Hermann, carefully modeled the few missing parts of the skeleton and breathed life into the imposing beast from South Dakota.
*"Secure" is the term used by H.F> Osborn in his paper describing this story. I imagine that some sort of exchange in money or fossils took place, but the details of such a trade are not to be found in the resources I've come across.
Standing eight feet high and stretching fourteen feet long, the skeleton looks as bizarre as that of any dinosaur. If you look at the illustration above closely, though, you'll notice bulbous spot on one of the ribs. This was where the rib was fractured and then healed, and we can only wonder how this individual sustained this injury. Still, as subtle as it is, the healed rib shows that this skeleton was not just some sort of mineral sculpture exhumed from the earth. The architecture once gave form to an animal that lived and breathed in North America millions of years before Wortman and Peterson would stumble across its remains at the end of the 19th century.
References;
Osborn, H.F.; Wortman, J.L.; Peterson, O.A. (1895) "Perissodactyls of the Lower Miocene White River beds." Bulletin of the AMNH; Vol. 7 (12), pp. 343-375
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Looking at the real healed rib fossil must feel akin to the time one of the people cleaning the Sistine Chapel found a hair of a brush still stuck in the fresco.
That sense of awe, that another real individual had movement, living a life, so long ago.
That specimen, healed rib-fracture and all, is (as you say) on display at the American Museum of Natural History (NY). I'm not sure what its current name is-- if you'd asked me, I would have guessed Brontops. (Late 19th C American paleontology seems to have been a bit overenthusiastic in naming new taxa, and I have a feeling that the exact taxonomy-- and so, given the rule of priority, the correct nomenclature-- of advanced Brontotheres is STILL being sorted out.)
I find it amusing that most books that contain an illustration of the skeleton of a Brontothere include the broken rib: most of the available artwork seems to be based on that one specimen!
Thanks for posting the picture: I don't think I've seen that particular drawing before, and Brontotheres are personal favorites of mine!
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(As for the emotional sense of connection with a particular individual of a fossil species... Very near the Brontothere in the AMNH is a skeleton of a mare of some fossil horse species that died in the process of giving birth to a foal: breech presentation, I think, something that is problematic for modern horses... and there were no vets on call in the late Miocene. Gives me the shivers every time I visit the
AMNH paleo halls.)
The latest reviser (2004: Columbia Ph.D. thesis and New Mexico Museum bulletin article, referenced in Wikipedia (? accessed via Palaeos.org)) apparently thinks all the "classic" late Eocene American brontotheres should go in a single taxon (and i think opts for "Megacerops" for the name). This has been suggested before, but rejected by a mid-1980s reviser (sorry, having a "senior moment" about the name: article in the Prothero and Schoch, eds., "Evolution of the Perissodactyls" volume), who thought there was enoug variation in the specimens he had seen to justify three taxa (Brontops, Menops, Megacerops).
Between them, Leidy, Cope, Marsh and Osborne seem to have come up with no less than NINE generic names for these beasties: Titanotherium, Brontotherium, Menodus, Diploclonus, Allops, Brontops, Megacerops, Megaceratops(*), Menops and Titanops(**) Is this some kind of record?
(*)Given that most generic names ending in "ceratops" denote ceratopsian dinosaurs, I can't help feeling relieved that this one is invalid!.
(**) There are obvious recombinations of syllables here that don't seem to have been used. I like the sound of "Diploclops," particularly if ichnological evidence turns up to show that Brontotheres had a trotting gait.