Dinosaurs in the Attic Read Free Page B

not far from Tavern on the Green, lie buried giant, broken molds of dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. These molds are all that remain of an extravagant plan to create a huge Paleozoic Museum and outdoor exhibit in Central Park. Modeled after Sydenham Palace, a large glass building and park outside London, the museum was to have exhibited "specimens of animals of the pre-Adamite period," including dinosaurs, extinct mosasaurs and mastodons, giant sloths, and Irish elk. The foundation for this museum was actually excavated in the southwest corner of the park, opposite 63rd Street. It remains there to this day, covered with earth.

    This was just one of many failed attempts to found a natural history museum in New York City. In the mid-nineteenth century, New York was rapidly becoming the financial center of the country, and many New Yorkers were amassing fortunes from railroads, banking, and other businesses during the expansion that followed the Civil War. These nouveaux riches were embarrassed by the conspicuous lack of cultural institutions in New York City. Most of the great cities of Europe boasted large natural history museums or "royal cabinets," as did many cities in America. Philadelphia had established the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1812, which was followed by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Boston Society of Natural History. Louis Agassiz' Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard, founded in 1859, was already renowned as the center of scientific learning in the United States. Men of science in Boston and Philadelphia scornfully dismissed New York as merely a center of crass commercialism, incapable of producing a museum of note.

    There probably was some truth to this. During the first half of the nineteenth century, lack of interest killed most efforts to build a natural history museum in New York. Those efforts that did materialize were little more than miscellaneous collections of curiosities.

    One of the first museums in New York to be completed was Delacourte's Cabinet of Natural History, founded in 1804. Delacourte's museum was typical of the so-called "cabinets of curiosities" prevalent during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Its published catalog listed the "Natural Productions and Curiosities which Compose the Collections of the Cabinet" (a rather motley assortment, as it turned out). In the catalog, Delacourte complained: "There is scarce a city or town of any importance in Europe that is not possessed of a collection of that kind; but in the United States of America ... there is scarcely a collection deserving of the name."

    In the fashion of the time, Delacourte sought "subscriptions" to support his collecting endeavors—in particular, to finance his search for a mastodon somewhere in North America. Although a number of prominent New Yorkers subscribed token amounts, the largest contribution he received was three dollars. On the verge of bankruptcy, he finally sold his collection to Russia.

    A few years later, one of Charles Willson Peale's sons (the elder Peale had founded the first museum in America, in Philadelphia) opened a Museum and Gallery of Fine Arts on lower Broadway. Its several galleries displayed paintings and various odd natural history items. A contemporary described it as having "very superior Cosmorana, several wax figures of good workmanship, fossil shells, minerals and miscellaneous curiosities." Like its fellow, this early museum also perished from lack of interest.

    The idea of a natural history museum in New York finally began to attract attention with the opening of the Lyceum of Natural History at its headquarters on lower Broadway in 1836. A number of leading scientists joined the Lyceum, including John James Audubon, Alexander Agassiz, and Asa Gray. They met periodically at the Lyceum and delivered papers. Its collections were more systematically organized, and included such things as mastodon bones found in upstate New York, a sheep