MARGINALIA
American Dinosaurs: Who and What Was First
Who gets credit for the first dinosaur in North America depends on one's definition of a description and a fossil
Keith Thomson
1787: What Constitutes a Description?
But Leidy is still only the first by default. As early as 1787, the
Philadelphia merchant Timothy Matlack and the distinguished
physician and anatomist Caspar Wistar read before a meeting of the
American Philosophical Society an account of "A large thigh
bone found near Woodbury Creek in Glocester County, N.J." The
creek runs not far from where, 70 years later, the first associated
remains of any dinosaur were excavated and described by Leidy as
Hadrosaurus—another herbivore like
Iguanodon. The Minutes of the October 5, 1787 meeting of
the Society record only the subject of the presentation and the
admonition that the authors, with a Dr. John Rodgers, were "to
search for the missing part of the skeleton." Unfortunately, no
copy of their manuscript exists, nor is there any information about
whether further collecting was attempted. Even the specimen itself
is missing, but we can be reasonably sure that this femur was the
first discovery of an American dinosaur. It would be nice to think
that the bone still exists in someone's attic.
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