Interesting Contents Archive

Heads up… it’s Fossil Friday! 🦕 The Museum's Apatosaurus, collected in the late 1890s, was the first sauropod ever mounted. But did you know that for years, this mighty dinosaur was displayed with the wrong skull? Using incomplete remains, scientists speculated that Apatosaurus was closely related to another sauropod: Camarasaurus. As a result, a similar skull to Camarasaurus was sculpted and placed atop Apatosaurus’ body (pictured), where it remained for decades. As new research emerged, this reconstruction was updated. To this day, only one Apatosaurus has ever been found with its skull attached! Image no. 45615 © AMNH Library #paleontology #fossilfriday #dinosaur #dinosaurs #fossils #naturalhistory #amnh

Still not as heavy as my emotional baggage.

In a 1900 letter, Roosevelt wrote that, “Some of my Republican supporters in West Virginia have just sent me a small bear which the children of their own accord christened Jonathan Edwards, partly out of compliment to their mother's ancestor, and partly because they thought they detected Calvinistic traits in the bear's character.” (Edwards, the famed revivalist preacher, was Edith Roosevelt’s great-great-great grandfather.)⁠ ⁠ Unfortunately, Jonathan Edwards’s time with the Roosevelt family was short-lived, which was probably for the best. On January 2, 1901, Roosevelt wrote to the Bronx Zoo, explaining that he had "a small bear named Jonathan Edwards," but “that we do not have the accommodations to keep him” and asked if the zoo would take him. (They did.) Which doesn’t mean that the Roosevelts weren’t open to keeping bears as pets; they reportedly had five.⁠ ⁠ Read about '21 of Theodore Roosevelt’s Most Memorable Pets' at the link in our bio.⁠

How's your blood pressure?