Surely all of you will remember John Hammond, the adorable old man from Jurassic Park, owner of the InGen company. Early in the film, at Ellie Sattler and Alan Grant ‘s Montana dig, we find out that he’s also a patron of their dig. But everything seems to be that, being a lover of dinosaurs, he finances this project, period.
The truth is that in the novels the reality is somewhat different: Grant and his team work for Hammond. Not only do they receive your money and use it for their excavations, but they give you reports of their finds and research results. Information they use from InGen to put it into practice when breeding dinosaurs. For, unlike the movie, in the novel Jurassic Park , Grant and Sattler work at a site of dinosaur nests and hatchlings , modeled after Montana’s Egg Hill where Jack Horner and his team discovered Maiasaura . And of course, receiving fresh, recently researched information about the reproductive and breeding habits of dinosaurs, as it is useful if you are going to dedicate yourself to cloning them and want them to survive…
The image of the patron in paleontology is not purely a film or a thing from novels, and in fact, great discoveries in the history of Vertebrate Paleontology have been due to this type of aid. In fact, John Hammond himself may be based on a historical figure, Andrew Carnegie.
Like the fictional John Hammond of Jurassic Park, Carnegie was Scottish, but lived and made his fortune in the United States. He began working at the Pennsylvania Railroad Company , of which he ended up being a manager. He created the Carnegie Steel Company, which ended up merging other companies in the sector to form US Steel . He amassed an enormous fortune which, as a philanthropist, he dedicated to subsidizing libraries, schools, universities and scientific research. And he founded a handful of institutions, such as the Carnegie Institution for Science , Carnegie Mellon University, or the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. In fact, it was through this museum and its researchers that Carnegie sponsored his excavations.
It seems that his interest in dinosaurs grew when he saw the ultra-sensationalist finding of a gigantic sauropod in Wyoming reported in a newspaper. Carnegie instructed the director of his museum in Pittsburgh, William Jacob Holland , to purchase this spectacular specimen for his museum. After moving to Wyoming, Holland’s men did not find that “giant brontosaurus” -and the news was based solely on a large femur- but in the Sheep Creek area they discovered a gigantic almost complete skeleton of a sauropod dinosaur from the already known genus Diplodocus, but it seemed to be a new species. Paleontologist John Bell Hatcher named this new species Diplodocus carnegii in honor of Carnegie, his greatest patron and founder of his museum. Interestingly, this skeleton was actually the mixture of several individuals, but it was mounted skeletally as if it were one. Something, by the way, very common in museums. This colossal assembly was inaugurated in 1907 and its fame spread like wildfire.
This specimen, although made up of several individuals, was nicknamed Dippy , and became very famous. Andrew Carnegie was so pleased with this find, and I suppose also with the fact that the dinosaur was named after him, that he acceded to the request of King Edward VII of England and paid for replicas of the skeleton to be made, which were mounted in the Museum . of Natural History, London , where it remained for decades, until it was recently disassembled and replaced with a whale skeleton to mount a traveling exhibition on Dippy. This donation encouraged further requests, and Carnegie gifted them to various European and American countries, where they were installed in their major museums. That is why a large number of museums have a copy of Dippy, such as the Museum für Nasturkunde in Berlin, the Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle in Paris, the Museo de La Plata in Buenos Aires, or the National Museum of Natural Sciences. in Madrid , among others. These donations from Carnegie made Diplodocus a very popular dinosaur, and made it possible, for the first time, for people all over the world to see a dinosaur up close. They also set the precedent for the production of fossil and skeleton replicas as a business, something that is more common today and that constitutes, at least in part, the source of financing for many museums and institutions.
As a paleontologist with projects in mind and lack of funding, I constantly ask myself, where are the Hammonds or Carnegies today? And surely many colleagues and colleagues think the same way.
References:
Perez-Garcia, A; Sánchez-Chillón, B. 2009. History of Diplodocus carnegii from the MNCN: first mounted dinosaur skeleton in the Iberian Peninsula. Spanish Journal of Palaeontology , 24-2: 133-148.
Sanz, JL 2007. Dragon Hunters: History of the paleontologists who discovered and studied the dinosaurs. Ed. Ariel.
Gascó, F. 2021. That was not in my dinosaur history book. Guadalmazán.
