Ever since Thomas Jefferson got into an argument with Count Georges-Louis Leclerc Buffon about whose was bigger (native wildlife, that is), American’s have been fixated on the idea that everything from the United States must by necessity be better, stronger, faster, and – yes – larger than anything comparable from anywhere else.
So it should come as no surprise that as the U.S. was celebrating itself and its accomplishments in what has become known as the Gilded Age, the great tycoons of that time saw the enormous sizes of recently unearthed dinosaur fossils as yet another way to proclaim that those of the U.S. were indeed the biggest.
In his newly published Assembling the Dinosaur; Fossil Hunters, Tycoons, and the Making of a Spectacle, Prof. Lukas Rieppel recounts the story of how such giants of industry as Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan teamed up with 19th century paleontologists and museum curators to harness the appeal of such even larger giants as Tyrannosaurus, Brontosaurus, and Triceratops to entertain the public as well as to further the idea that American exceptionalism is so powerful that it even pre-dates the founding of the nation – by hundreds of millions of years.
