The Great Dinosaur Debate by Robert T. Bakker

He could envision the ways they might fit together just by examining the proportions of the bones and the shape of their articulations. That didn’t make sense to Ostrom as he puzzled over the ankles, toes, and arm bones of the fossil that day in 1970. But in 1857, the confusing fossil von Meyer was describing-the future TM6928 and 29-seemed like something far more ordinary: another pterosaur, a type of flying reptile.

With Archaeopteryx, it seemed as if the proof of evolutionary theory had arrived, like the Ten Commandments, engraved in stone. Coming just after the publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the unveiling of that 150-million-year-old urvogel, or archetypal primitive bird, made an international sensation. Von Meyer later became famous for the first scientific description, in 1861, of Archaeopteryx. It had been discovered near Riedenburg, Germany, in 1855 and named by the great nineteenth-century paleontologist Hermann von Meyer. This fossil was a dinner plate–size muddle of limb fragments, vertebrae, and ribs preserved in limestone from the Solnhofen beds. Ostrom, then 42, was an unprepossessing figure and the world’s leading authority on dinosaurs, and the museum curator was pleased to leave him alone with the twin halves of the limestone slab catalogued TM6928 and 29. His itinerary took him, in early September, to the Teylers Museum in Haarlem, the Netherlands. Ostrom was traveling through Europe studying pterosaur fossils. In the summer of 1970, early in the research that would radically transform how we think about birds, dinosaurs, and the origins of animal flight, Yale paleontologist John H. We commissioned an artist to update the Peabody Museum’s iconic “Age of Reptiles” mural to conform to more recent discoveries about dinosaurs.

Nick Longrich has found a half-dozen new species by looking at fossils other scientists had forgotten.

The Great Dinosaur Debate by Robert T. Bakker