The collectors were discouraged but vowed to continue. Two months later they had worked their way thirty miles from their original site into the Sheep Creek region of Wyoming. This was geologically a part of the Morrison formation, in which important dinosaur finds had been made before. Finally, on the morning of July 4, 1899, Coggeshall discovered a dinosaur's toe bone. By afternoon the men had uncovered more bones and realized the find was significant. It was a well-preserved Diplodocus, the most complete found to that time. Because of the date of its discovery, Coggeshall joked that this Late Jurassic beast from 120 million years earlier be called the "Star-Spangled Dinosaur." Director Holland, however, describing the find in the scientific literature in 1901, chose to honor his patron, officially naming the dinosaur Diplodocus carnegii.

Carnegie was delighted. In later years he was to send the famed collector Earl Douglass west with instructions to "bring back something as big as a barn." D. carnegii was certainly as big as a barn; at eighty-four feet it was the longest land animal ever found. (It was too big, in fact, to fit inside the Carnegie Museum and was not displayed until 1907.) The millionaire decided to have copies made of "Dippy," as the skeleton became known, to send all over the world.

"Dippy" has been on display in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History's Dinosaur Hall since 1907.

This was no simple task, for the Diplodocus skeleton had almost three hundred bones, with twenty-two feet of neck and fifty feet of tail. In life D. carnegii had weighed about twelve tons; although most of that weight was taken up by flesh, the bones were now petrified and were themselves extremely heavy. Arthur Coggeshall had to invent a structural steel framework to support the vertebrate column, a system still used for exhibiting dinosaurs around the world.

A team of Italians skilled in making statues created Dippy's molds over a two-year period, and the replicas were then cast by Serafino Augustini at a cost of thirty thousand dollars each. Copies were sent to national museums in England, Germany, France, Italy, Austria, Russia, Argentina, Spain, and Mexico. Each time Director Holland accompanied the thirty-three boxes of bones, and at each stop he would make a speech, presenting Carnegie's compliments, receive a medal or two, and then remain to show museum workers how to erect Dippy. (Carnegie himself attended the first presentation, to King Edward VII in London in 1905.) The final trip, in 1929 to Mexico City, was authorized by Louise Carnegie, whose husband had died in 1919.

Scientists preparing Dippy's bones.

Because of its widespread dispersal, D. carnegii has become the best-known dinosaur in the world. It became famous enough to have at least one poem written in its honor, an old song quoted by Holland in his book To the River Plate and Back: "The Crowned heads of Europe/ All make a royal fuss/ Over Uncle Andy/ and his old Diplodocus."

A special copy of Carnegie's dinosaur, cast from the original molds, was made in Vernal, Utah, in the 1950s. It stands today in the Dinosaur Gardens of the Utah Natural History State Museum. The molds finally fell apart because of old age soon after it was made, so this all-weather Diplodocus—the eleventh version of the dinosaur sent around the world—twill stand as the last.

Director Holland, whose shrewd publicity gesture in naming D. carnegii worked such wonders, repeated himself when Earl Douglass discovered an extremely fine Apatosaurus near Vernal in 1909. This dinosaur, 71.5 feet long and 15 feet high, became Apatosaurus louisae, in honor of Carnegie's wife. The gesture won Holland an extra five thousand dollars for that year's paleontological research. ⁴

The first cast of the Carnegie Diplodocus Carnegii at London's Natural History Museum, presented by Andrew Carnegie to the British museum in 1905

The Chopo University Museum in Mexico City received the 9th Diplodocus cast in 1929.

Plaster cast of Diplodocus Carnegii in Madrid, Spain

Plaster cast of Diplodocus Carnegii in Japan

Plaster cast of Diplodocus Carnegii in Berlin

Plaster cast of Diplodocus Carnegii at the Utah Field House of Natural History, in Vernal, Utah

The Carnegie Museum of Art's Hall of Sculpture ⁵

The Hall of Sculpture was originally designed to house Carnegie Museum of Art's collection of reproduction Egyptian, Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman sculptures. When the hall opened in 1907, a majority of these 69 plaster casts occupied the ground floor. The design of the hall was inspired the Parthenon, the fifth-century BCE temple in Athens, Greece. Dedicated to the virgin goddess Athena, the protectress of Athens, the Parthenon (from the Greek word parthenos, meaning "maiden" or "virgin") was built overlooking the city. The imperial scale of the Parthenon, the beauty of its decorative sculpture, and the visual harmony among its architectural elements account for its renown ever since it was built.


The architects of the Hall of Sculpture chose to model their room on the Parthenon's cella, or inner sanctuary, which was distinguished by a double tier of columns (the cella of the Parthenon had to accommodate a 40-foot statue of Athena). The hall was constructed with brilliant white marble from the same quarries in Greece that provided the stone for the Parthenon. Because the Hall of Sculpture was a public museum space, the architects created a balcony with a decorative iron railing to make viewing from the second floor possible. The balcony of the Hall of Sculpture is now reserved for decorative arts objects--principally glass, ceramics, and metalwork--that may range in date from the 18th to the 20th century.

While much of Andrew Carnegie's cast collection, including several notable examples from the Parthenon itself, is currently on view in the museum's Hall of Architecture, several works have been placed on pedestals around the Hall of Sculpture balcony as reminders of the original purpose of the room. Still installed directly below the skylight in the position it has occupied since 1907 is a plaster reproduction of the carved frieze, or decorative band, that was originally positioned on the exterior of the Parthenon's cella. This frieze depicts the procession that inaugurated the annual festival of Athena in ancient Athens. Today in the Hall of Sculpture, Carnegie Museum of Art displays works from its permanent collection; it has frequently been used for site-specific installations and performances. For the 1988 Carnegie International, the museum's triennial exhibition of contemporary art, the German artist Lothar Baumgarten (b. 1944) produced The Tongue of the Cherokee for the hall's skylight ceiling. This work presents the Cherokee alphabet, which was formulated in the early 19th century. Just as the choice of a Greek-inspired design for the Hall of Sculpture reflects the importance of that ancient culture to American politics, so the Cherokee alphabet serves as a reminder of the presence in this country of Native Americans and recognizes their role in American history. ⁶

Exploring the Question of 'What-is-Contemporary?' ⁷

In describing her thinking for the 57th Carnegie International, Carnegie Museum of Art curator Ingrid Schaffner seeks the answer to the question, 'What is Contemporary?' :

Paleoart ⁹

A rather different variation on the postmodern strategy of "paleoart" is offered by Allan McCollum, an artist who is perhaps best known for his Surrogate Paintings and Plaster Surrogates, cast objects that look like blank pictures in sleek modern frames, hung in clusters like an array of paintings in a Victorian study gallery. Like Mark Dion, McCollum is not really asking us to look at the individual objects, especially the blank spaces inside the frames, but to look at the entire space or environment as a representation of the way we display pictures in our culture. Every picture is unique--or at least the frame is--but at the same time they are all exactly the same, epitomizing the kind of serial repetition that is characteristic of images as species or genera of artifacts. You've seen one McCollum surrogate and you've seen them all, yet none is exactly like any other. It is as if McCollum were imagining a future world in which all the pictures had gone blank, could no longer be seen or deciphered, but all remained in their positions on the walls. They hint at a world in which pictures would be fossils, traces of vanished, obsolete species. Perhaps this would be a world of the blind, in which pictures would function as sculptural pieces, and we would grope along the walls to be reassured by touch that they were still in their places. Or perhaps it would be a world in which people were so imaginative that they could treat any blank space as a projection screen to recall any memory or fantasy they desired. We might even see here a premonition of the virtual galleries Bill Gates is installing in his electronic Xanadu in Seattle, galleries in which images from a global data base can be retrieved with the click of a remote control. In any event, McCollum's surrogates invite us to reframe the entire convention of pictorial display, to see a gallery the way an archaeologist might see an excavated treasure room, as a strange space filled with shapes and signs that may have lost their meaning, or may never have had any meaning in the first place. The effect is a curious combination of irony and melancholy, what Fredric Jameson has aptly termed "nostalgia for the present" endemic to postmodernism.

If the surrogate pieces seem archaeological, representing cultural artifacts as if they were the unreadable relics of a past generation, McCollum's more recent work has moved into the realm of paleontology and natural history. These copies or surrogates are not of artificial objects, but of what McCollum calls "copies produced by nature." ¹⁰ In The Dog from Pompei (series begun 1990) and Lost Objects (series begun 1991), McCollum simply inserts himself into the process of reproduction or replication inherent in the natural formation of fossils. The dog is an indefinitely reproducible series of polymer-enhanced Hydrocal casts, taken from a mold that was made from a cast based on a "natural mold" left by the body of a dog that was smothered in the Vesuvius explosion of 79 A.D. The Lost Objects "are cast in glass-fiber-reinforced concrete from rubber molds taken of fossil dinosaur bones in the vertebrate paleontology section of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh." Fifteen different molds have been painted in fifty different colors, making "750 unique Lost Objects to date."

Traditional notions of the relation of copy and original, not to mention the status of the artistic "authorial" function, are clearly under considerable pressure in these works, and their effect is very difficult to pin down. In some ways, these works seem to fulfill Walter Benjamin's prediction that the age of mechanical reproduction would mean that the endless series of identical replicas would replace the unique art object with its "aura" of authorial expressiveness and tradition. McCollum makes "mass produced" objects in a kind of art factory, like an automobile manufacturer. Yet the objects do seem to have a kind of melancholy aura, one that is increased rather than diminished by their mass gathering in the space of display. It is as if they were occasions for a double mourning, first for the deaths of the remote creatures whose traces are retraced here, and second for loss of auratic uniqueness itself, as if we were grieving over the loss of the ability to feel certain kinds of emotions. Certainly these works don't tend to provoke laughter the way the surrogates do. They are too literal in their evocation of death, disaster, and mass extinction. The dog, as the favorite domestic animal of the Romans, evokes the sphere of privacy and the everyday in the proximity of catastrophe. The bones, on the other hand, evoke the larger public spheres of the nation and the world--the dinosaur as giant "ruler of the earth," a symbol of the American nation or of the human race more generally. Taken together, McCollum's "dog and bone" series suggest a kind of symbiotic completeness in the postmodern rendering of nature.

McCollum's own remarks on the bones makes it clear that a specifically national feeling was central to the production of this work:

The installation of these bones in the neoclassical atrium of the Carnegie Museum is for me (also an American) an uncanny resurrection of Thomas Jefferson's lost "bone room" in the east Room of the White House, as if we were privileged to go back in time and see the mastodon bones replaced by their cultural descendants, the dinosaurs. ¹¹