Dragon Hunters Exhibition
Are you fascinated by dinosaurs? Do you know how and who found their fossils? Relive the exciting story of the paleontologists who discovered them in Dragon Hunters, the new great exhibition of the Archaeological and Paleontological Museum of the Community of Madrid for explorers of all ages.
Dragon Hunters presents the thrilling story of the discovery of dinosaurs, especially the paleontologists who began to study and name them. A journey from Victorian England to the present day, including the American West, the Gobi Desert, Tanzania and Patagonia. A spectacular selection of fossils that allow us to contemplate and walk among these wonderful animals, and also to understand how advances in scientific knowledge about dinosaurs have been reflected in their public image, present since their discovery in popular culture because of the fascination they evoke.
THE STORY OF THE DISCOVERY OF THE DINOSAURS
The exhibition begins with the “DINOSAURS OF LEGEND” section, which reviews the first interpretations of dinosaur bones. In 1667, the naturalist Robert Plot published the first fragment of a dinosaur bone, which was interpreted as belonging to one of the elephants that the Romans brought to the British Isles or, later, as a biblical giant.
The section “WHEN PALEONTOLOGY MET DINOSAURS” details the first scientific studies of dinosaurs: William Buckland (1784-1856), Gideon Mantell (1790-1852), and Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) interpreted the first dinosaurs as the remains of giant lizards, and in 1841 Richard Owen first applied the word “dinosaur” (“terrible lizards”) to this group of new species.
The section “THE BONE WAR IN THE WILD WEST” is dedicated to the competition established in the second half of the 19th century by two North American paleontologists, Othniel Charles Marsh (1831-1899) and Edward Drinker Cope (1840-1897). Both led teams that conducted extensive excavations and made a wealth of discoveries that laid the foundation for modern dinosaur paleontology. The exhibition includes some fossils from the Morrison Formation in Montana (USA).
“ADVENTURE DINOSAURIOLOGY” covers the first decades of the 20th century, when various institutions organized major excavations in exotic locations such as Tendaguru (Tanzania). The archetype of the adventurous paleontologist is undoubtedly Roy Chapman Andrews (1884-1960), explorer, zoologist and adventurer at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
The work of Barnum Brown (1872-1963), who can be considered the paradigm of dinosaur hunters and probably the most experienced dinosaurist of all time, also dates from this period. Over the course of his career, he unearthed the first five Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons, laying the groundwork for its definition as a species and contributing greatly to its legend.
The second half of the 20th century saw a paradigm shift in the interpretation of dinosaurs as clumsy and poorly adapted animals virtually destined for extinction. It was the work of John H. Ostrom in 1969 and Robert T. Bakker in his work “DINOSAUR RENAISSANCE” that promoted concepts such as the dinosaurian origin of today’s birds or the possibility that some dinosaurs were warm-blooded animals.
The exhibition also pays special attention to the fossil record associated with dinosaur eggs in the “STEPPING ON EGGS” section, with some specimens from the Poyos site in Guadalajara, the southernmost evidence of a dinosaur breeding area in Europe.
THE HUNCHBACKED HUNTER OF CUENCA
The main protagonist of the exhibition is Concavenator corcovatus (“the hunchbacked hunter of Cuenca”), a 6-meter-long theropod dinosaur that lived around 130 million years ago in the Lower Cretaceous period, in what is now the province of Cuenca, and whose fossil and replica can be seen in the exhibition.
It is the largest fossil found at the Las Hoyas site and the most complete and best preserved of the medium-sized theropods found in Europe. The specimen is almost complete and articulated, and its state of preservation is so exceptional that it even preserves impressions of scales and soft tissues.
The exhibition concludes with a section dedicated to the new technologies applied to the study of animals from the distant past, which in recent years have brought about a real revolution in our knowledge of dinosaurs.
Curators:
José Luis Sanz, Professor of Paleontology at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid
Francisco Ortega, Professor at the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia