The second Jurassic dinosaur rush and the dawn of dinomania

During the second Jurassic dinosaur rush museum paleontologists raced to display the world's first mounted sauropod dinosaur. The American Museum of Natural History triumphed in 1905 when its Brontosaurus debuted before an admiring crowd of wealthy New Yorkers. The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago and other institutions were quick to follow with their own sauropod displays. Thereafter, dinomania spread far and wide, and big, showpiece dinosaurs became a museum staple. This brief but intensely competitive period of acquisitiveness fostered important Jurassic dinosaur revisions and crucial innovations in paleontological field and lab techniques.‘Men of science are often carried away by personal ambition and by a fierce spirit of competition with their rivals, as well as by a sense of scientific power, to employ methods which are wholly unworthy of the true spirit of American scientific research.’—Henry Fairfield Osborn, 1931