Carnegie Museum of Natural History: Vertebrate Paleontology Collections

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Allosaurus fragilis:  The razor-toothed Allosaurus as seen in
Dinosaurs in Their Time at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
Photo Credit:  Joshua Franzos for Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Carnegie Museum of Natural History: Vertebrate Paleontology Collections

400 Forbes Avenue

Pittsburgh, PA

Website:  Carnegie Museum of Natural History

Carnegie Museum of Natural History: Vertebrate Paleontology Collections

The Treasure:  The vertebrate paleontology collections at Carnegie Museum of Natural History are justifiably famous for their magnificent dinosaur skeletons but are just as important for the breadth and depth of their collections, from the early fish of the Silurian seas to cave fauna of the Pleistocene.

Accessibility:  Carnegie Museum of Natural History is open Tuesday through Friday from 10 to 5, Thursday from 10 to 8, and Sunday from noon to 5.

Andrew Carnegie.
Photo courtesy of Carnegie
Museum of Natural History.

Background:  At Carnegie Museum of Natural History, dinosaurs are the superstar attraction. They were big at the turn-of-the-century when steel magnate Andrew Carnegie decided that the new Carnegie Museum of Natural History needed dinosaur bones—the bigger, the better. And they’re still big today, proudly exhibited in Dinosaurs in Their Time, the museum’s thorough re-imagining of a dinosaur hall for the 21st century.

But a great vertebrate paleontology collection covers a huge spectrum of time, with only a medium-sized wedge for the age of dinosaurs in the middle. The Carnegie Museum’s collections trace the story of vertebrate life over nearly half a billion years, with 103,000 specimens extending from primitive early fish of the Silurian period (about 420 million years ago) to cave fauna of the Pleistocene (within the last couple of million years). While the collections are international in scope, they can boast of a fine representation of North American prehistory. The museum has prime fossils of bony fish from the Mississippian period found in Montana, amphibians and early reptile remains from the Pennsylvanian and Permian periods unearthed in the Mid-Atlantic region, mammal fossils of the Cenozoic era from the American west, and relatively recent (Quaternary epoch) fossils discovered in the Appalachians and Rocky Mountains.

A glimpse of the Big Bone Room, a collection storage area for the vertebrate
paleontology collections. Save America's Treasures funding contributed to
installation of a new climate control system for the collection storage areas.
Photo courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Starting in 1898, Andrew Carnegie enthusiastically financed the Carnegie Museum’s western fossil hunting expeditions. The director of the museum, William J. Holland, fittingly repaid Carnegie for his generosity, naming the museum’s first great dinosaur find (the nearly complete skeleton of a new species of sauropod) after the museum’s patron—Diplodocus carnegie. Proud of his namesake dinosaur and the museum’s work, Carnegie continued to invest in the hunt for American dinosaurs.

Earl Douglass.
Photo courtesy of
Carnegie Museum of
Natural History.

In 1902, the Carnegie Museum hired Earl Douglass, a resourceful scientist with a trained eye and the fortitude to thrive in the sometimes harsh conditions of the American west. Concentrating on outcrops of the promising Morrison Formation along the Colorado-Utah border, Douglass spied eight Apatosaurus tail bones embedded at the top of a ledge on one of his outings. As Douglass and his crew unearthed this great find, a nearly complete Apatosaurus skeleton, they discovered that the surrounding rock was crammed with many more treasures. The exposed tail bones had lured Douglass to what turned out to be one of the world’s greatest fossil beds, loaded with dinosaur remains.

Over the next 13 years, Douglass shipped hundreds of tons of material back to the Carnegie Museum, comprising nearly forty Jurassic period dinosaur skeletons, including Apatosaurus, Camarasaurus, Diplodocus, Stegosaurus, and Camptosaurus. When the Carnegie Museum pulled out in 1924, satisfied with their haul, Douglass stayed on, now working under the auspices of the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Utah. He died in 1931, many years before his ambitious dream of establishing the quarry as a site for interpreting fossil-hunting was fully realized. In 1958, Douglass’ intact quarry wall, a veritable stew of dinosaur bones, was opened to public view as the centerpiece of Dinosaur National Monument.

Historic photo of Douglass' crew packing fossils at
Dinosaur National Monument, Utah, in the early 1900s.
Image courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Tinted postcard of the Gallery of Paleontology at Carnegie Museum
of Natural History in 1907.
Image courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

Other Recommended Sites:  The Earl Douglass Workshop Laboratory, built into a hillside near the Utah quarry in 1920, is still standing at Dinosaur National Monument. After he discovered the site in 1909, Douglass chose to make Utah his home, inviting his wife and baby to join him for a pioneer life in the largely unsettled canyon area. He prepared the fossils there—eventually using the resources of this Workshop Laboratory—and then shipped them east by train to Carnegie Museum of Natural History for exhibition to a public hungry for dinosaurs.

Stegosaurus armatus:  Known as one of the
largest plated dinosaurs, the massive Stegosaurus
stands ready to defend itself in Dinosaurs in Their
Time at Carnegie Museum of Natural History.
This specimen was found in Utah by Earl Douglass
and crew between 1920 and 1922.
Photo Credit:  Joshua Franzos for Carnegie
Museum of Natural History.

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