The Gallery of Lost Creations

Twenty-three whole dinosaurs in a coal mine, and other things this book reports without blinking.

H. N. Hutchinson wrote for readers who had never heard the word dinosaur, and he kept the best material in plain sight. These are the strangest true things in the book — each one linking to the page it came from.

1. In 1878 a colliery at Bernissart in Belgium hit something no one had ever found before: twenty-three Iguanodons, whole, in one mine. Hutchinson calls it a discovery unique of its kind in the whole history of geological science.Read it: Armoured Dinosaurs and the Iguanodon: Mantell
2. The larger Bernissart animal, Iguanodon bernissartensis, stands fifteen feet high and runs over thirty feet from snout to tail-tip.Read it: Armoured Dinosaurs and the Iguanodon: Mantell
3. The Iguanodon's famous thumb spike spent years in the wrong place. It was first read as a horn for the animal's nose — the spur is now known to sit at the end of the thumb, and nobody is sure what it was for.Read it: Armoured Dinosaurs and the Iguanodon: Dinosaurs
4. Professor Marsh's theory of how Stegosaurus died out is magnificently Victorian: as the armour grew, the neck, feet and skeleton were remodelled to carry it, until the head became so heavy the body could not bear it.Read it: Armoured Dinosaurs and the Iguanodon: Marsh
5. Stegosaurus entered the literature in 1877 at about twenty-five feet long, out of Jurassic strata on the eastern flank of the Rocky Mountains.Read it: Armoured Dinosaurs and the Iguanodon: Stegosaurus
6. Dinornis parvus, the dwarf Moa, was only three feet high — the runt of a family whose largest members towered over a man.Read it: Ancient Birds: Dinornis
7. From an Otago cave in 1882 came a Moa's head, neck, legs and feet with the dried skin still on the bones and a few reddish feathers still attached to the leg. The ring of the windpipe was still in place.Read it: Ancient Birds: Dinornis
8. Hesperornis had teeth in its jaws — no living bird does — and a single thin wing-bone so reduced that the wings were useless for either flying or swimming.Read it: Ancient Birds: Marsh
9. The oldest known fossil bird announced itself modestly: at first, the impression of a single feather was all anyone had of Archæopteryx.Read it: Ancient Birds: Archæopteryx
10. On Huxley's theory that birds descended from dinosaurs, Hutchinson declines to commit — preferring, he says, like the Irishman, to “prophesy after the event.” He was betting against the winner.Read it: Ancient Birds (Nor is the value)
11. About 1613 a man named Matzuyer exhibited Mastodon bones as the remains of a human giant, Teutoboccus rex, and made a great stir in France.Read it: Extinct Whales and Wombats: Zeuglodon
12. Koch assembled elephant and mastodon bones into one enormous invented skeleton and showed it at the Egyptian Hall, Piccadilly, as the “Missourium.” The British Museum bought the collection — and picked from the wreckage the bones of its own genuine mastodon.Read it: Extinct Whales and Wombats: Zeuglodon
13. Giant squid were dismissed as sailors' invention until specimens turned up at more than fifty feet, with reports running to eighty — which is how a fair share of sea-serpent sightings got explained.Read it: Extinct Whales and Wombats: Appendix
14. The Diprotodon beds lie six hundred miles north of Adelaide, where in the dry season everything moves by camel at 111° Fahrenheit in the shade — “to say nothing of myriads of flies and frequent sandstorms.”Read it: Extinct Whales and Wombats: Diprotodon
15. Those same Australian beds preserved impressions of the marsupial pouch, and several distinct prints of the skin of the fore foot.Read it: Extinct Whales and Wombats: Diprotodon
16. Dicynodon means “twice dog-toothed.” Owen reconstructed a South African race of reptiles combining crocodile, tortoise and lizard, carrying a pair of long tusks set in sockets like a walrus.Read it: Anomalous Reptiles (Endeavour to complete)
17. Those same anomodonts show characters pointing at mammals — specifically at the Spiny Ant-eater and the Duck-mole, the creature that lays eggs like a reptile.Read it: Anomalous Reptiles (Endeavour to complete)
18. Pareiasaurus is complete enough that the Natural History Museum gave it a glass case to itself at the end of the fossil reptile gallery.Read it: Anomalous Reptiles: Seeley
19. The Tuatara's extinct relatives ran to nine feet long. Hutchinson had guessed three years earlier that their build implied a tortoise-like shield — and reports, in 1909, that a genus with exactly that armour has just turned up.Read it: Anomalous Reptiles: Tuatara
20. Labyrinthodonts are also called Stegocephali, “roof-skulled,” because the entire top of the skull behind the eye-holes is closed over with a solid sheet of bone.Read it: Ancient Salamanders: Mastodonsaurus
21. The whole science traces back to 1840, when Richard Owen examined some teeth from Coton End quarry in Warwickshire and recognised them as an amphibian's.Read it: Ancient Salamanders: English
22. The name Mastodonsaurus is a permanent embarrassment: it suggests kinship with the Mastodon, an elephant, with which this giant amphibian had no connection whatever.Read it: Ancient Salamanders: English
23. Whales and mammoths shared this country, proved by a discovery in a cliff near Brighton in 1828 — and the Norfolk forest-bed has given up the long spear-tusk of a narwhal.Read it: Extinct Whales and Wombats: Squalodon