The second American Jurassic dinosaur rush, 1895--1905 (Henry Fairfield Osborn, Elmer Samuel Riggs, William Jacob Holland, Edward Drinker Cope, Othniel Charles Marsh, New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois)

In the 1890s, the institutional setting for American vertebrate paleontology shifted from private collections to urban museums funded by large-scale philanthropy, including the American Museum in New York, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, and the Field Columbian Museum in Chicago. This shift ignited a fierce competition among museum paleontologists to find, collect, and display fossil vertebrates, especially gigantic Jurassic sauropod dinosaurs from the American West. Museums launched ambitious expeditions aimed at collecting exhibit-quality dinosaurs. Fieldworkers scoured the western states for new Jurassic field sites. They developed new, better procedures for excavating, packing, and handling fossils. Fossil preparators, likewise, developed revolutionary techniques for removing fossils from their rocky matrix, and for mounting them for display. The object of building composite skeletons from the accumulated parts of individual dinosaurs encouraged "lumping," rather than "splitting," which was the norm during the first Jurassic dinosaur rush. Henry Fairfield Osborn, founder and first curator of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum, and chief protagonist of the second Jurassic dinosaur rush, emphasized that early 20 th century vertebrate paleontology was a cooperative venture. But Osborn and his rivals were every bit as competitive, petty and proprietary as their infamous 19th century predecessors, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.