Reading Response - Preston, 13 April 2010

In the "Dinsosaur Gold Rush" chapter, I was struck by the similarities between the Museum leaving the fictive brontosaurus skull on a reconstructed apatosaurus skeleton and the parallel evolutionary timelines in the Horses exhibition from last week's LaTour reading. While unintentional, the effect is more or less the same - something of a concession to, and an acceptance of, different fact-events through the history of paleontology. Assembling prehistoric skeletons is a daunting task, and I can imagine that it is all too easy to speculate in the wrong direction - after all, all paleontology is really just highly refined deductive speculation - and in the case of the brontosaur/apatosaur in the museum, science had an idea that was the best that could be collectively agreed upon for a time, which was rectified at a later point when new circumstances emerged and new information was available. This is the same with the 19th-Century and contemporary horse evolution timelines in the LaTour article. What both of these exhibits highlight, for me, is that scientific fact is very often a product of circumstance - for example, the conditions in the realm of American vertebrate paleontology that rebuffed challenges to the use of the "wrong" skull for Brown's [?] apatosaur skeleton.