The Long-Lost Secret Diary of the World's Worst Dinosaur Hunter Read online

  Tomorrow we shall store our luggage, take our seats, and continue our return journey in greater comfort.

  Tuesday, November 1st

  We arrived back in Bristol this morning. I must admit to a certain relief on returning to the gloomy English climate after the heat of the New World. The slate gray skies and light drizzle were a real comfort as we made our way to the railway station.

  Rather than getting off at Bath and taking a carriage home, we decided to carry straight on to London and show our finds to Mr. Armstrong. I’m sure he’ll be just as excited with the bones as I am, and I can’t wait to share them.

  Wednesday, November 2nd

  It took us so long to find a carriage that would take all our trunks that we didn’t reach Mr. Armstrong’s house until after midnight.

  We had to wake up Mrs. Baker, and her mood turned even fouler when she saw all of our trunks.

  “The last thing we need is more of them lizard bones,” she said as we carried the cases up the narrow stairway. “If you ask me, it’ll serve him right if lizards steal his bones after he dies.”

  Mr. Armstrong was overjoyed when he saw our finds, and he clapped his hands together over and over again as I showed them to him. He stayed up for the whole night to examine them, but you would never have known to see him at breakfast. His passion for the fossils had energized him more than the strongest coffee ever could.

  He confirmed that we’d discovered some new species, and he proposed the names Triceratops, Diplodocus, Allosaurus, and Stegosaurus. I warned him that all but the latter would probably be named after Professor Wolf, but he thinks we may still have a chance to claim the beasts if we act fast.

  He’s arranged a meeting of the Geological Society on Saturday, and he’s sure that even the stuffiest old members won’t dismiss me this time.

  That gives me just a few days to prepare my new speech. I won’t attempt a long introduction this time, I’ll just go straight to my finds and let my dinosaurs do the talking.

  Thursday, November 3rd

  I returned Mr. Armstrong’s map and journals today, and I read him some entries from this diary.

  He apologized over and over again for putting me in contact with Professor Wolf. He says the world of bone hunting is cursed with more barbarity than the dinosaurs themselves were capable of. He’s going to write to his friend Professor Godwin at Yale University and tell him all about what happened. He’ll soon spread the word about Professor Wolf among the fossil experts of the New World, which should tarnish his reputation and maybe even discredit his finds.

  I hope he succeeds. I already feel sorry for those poor creatures for being extinct. The last thing they need is to be named after Professor Wolf.

  Saturday, November 5th

  This afternoon we took the trunks down to the Geological Society and I pieced each species together as best as I could. Then I covered them up with blankets so I could reveal them one by one.

  I decided to start with the Stegosaurus fossil as it’s the one Professor Wolf might not have. Even if the scientists lost interest after five minutes, it would be recorded that I discovered Stegosaurus. After that strong start, I’d show them the Allosaurus, then the Diplodocus, before building to my showstopper, the Triceratops.

  As I watched Mr. Armstrong open the doors and usher the scientists in, I noticed the same three old men taking their seats on the front row. Sir Leopold Pinkerton Hamilton sat in the middle, with Sir Fitzhugh Xavier Sapping to his left and Sir Hobart Remmington Risewell to his right. Their pained faces gave me a brief stab of doubt. Perhaps even my amazing finds wouldn’t be enough to win them over.

  “This is what you call an emergency meeting for?” shouted Sir Leopold Pinkerton Hamilton. “More infantile fantasies?”

  “I think you’ll be very interested in what she has to show,” said Mr. Armstrong, clapping his hands together. “And I’m sure a respected scientist such as yourself will wait to see the evidence before passing judgment.”

  Sir Leopold stared at me with a look of distaste, as though he had unexpectedly eaten something sour.

  When everyone had taken their seats, I announced that I had just returned from the American West.

  “Ghastly place,” muttered Sir Fitzhugh Xavier Sapping. “I hear that every creature over there is as small and wretched as a dormouse. Even their lions are weaker than our kittens.”

  I decided to get straight on with revealing the bones before any more ill-informed chatter could break out. I whipped the blanket away from the Stegosaurus bones and went through them. There was a murmur of excitement when I showed them the back plates.

  “Nonsense,” shouted Sir Hobart Remmington Risewell. “Those are clearly the remains of a turtle who died fighting a lizard. Tenacious animals, turtles.”

  “Or maybe a dog with spikes on its back,” muttered Sir Leopold Pinkerton Hamilton. “I saw one just like that while my glasses were being mended.”

  This time the others took no notice. They weren’t really paying much attention to what I was saying either, to be honest. They were transfixed by the bones. Many had risen from their seats, and were jostling to get a better look.

  When I pulled the cloth away from the Allosaurus, some of the scientists at the back stood on their seats. One even overbalanced with excitement and had to be helped outside to take some air.

  When I whipped away the blanket covering the Diplodocus, they could contain themselves no more. They rushed to the front, desperate to get closer to the amazing beasts.

  Sir Leopold Pinkerton Hamilton, Sir Hobart Remmington Risewell, and Sir Fitzhugh Xavier Sapping remained seated with their arms folded, muttering angrily about dogs and turtles. But all the others crowded around me, yelling questions from all directions.

  Mr. Armstrong had to raise his voice like a strict schoolteacher to make them sit down so I could finish. When I was finally done, I was given a hearty round of applause. It made quite a change from my last presentation, which was greeted only by the sound of people leaving.

  We stayed in the hall until late this evening. None of the men would leave until they’d had a chance to discuss the finds with me, and at least five of them promised to submit papers to scientific journals naming me as the finder of the beasts.

  By the end of the night, even Sir Leopold Pinkerton Hamilton was starting to admit that my discoveries were significant, though he had the nerve to claim that a trained researcher would have been able to uncover even better ones if they’d been in the West of America.

  Mr. Armstrong told me not to worry about it, as Sir Leopold never admits he was wrong about anything. Soon he’ll be claiming he was the only one in the room who understood the importance of the fossils.

  Sir Leopold Pinkerton Hamilton and the others have promised to give Mr. Armstrong some money to open a museum dedicated to ancient fossils, and he wants my creatures to have a starring role. Mr. Armstrong even thinks ordinary members of the general public should be allowed in, though not everyone agrees with him.

  I was happy to leave my monsters with Mr. Armstrong, even if I have grown a little attached to them. It would be wonderful if he could put them on display for the ordinary men and women of London. The more we nurture a love for fossils, the more people will get involved, and the more creatures we’ll discover. Despite what some members of the society would say, you need nothing more than a hammer to begin a career as a bone hunter. I’m proof of that.

  I’m glad we’re returning home tomorrow, even if the Stegosaurus and his friends are staying here. I enjoyed my adventure in the New World, but right now I just want to return to my cold, rainy beach.

  GET REAL

  London’s Natural History Museum opened in 1881. Sir Richard Owen was in charge of the British Museum’s natural history section, and felt it deserved a building of its own. Owen made the museum open to the general public rather t
han just the scientific elite, which was unusual at the time.

  Monday, December 5th

  Two letters were delivered to Father while I was at the seashore this morning. It seems my fame is spreading:

  Dear Miss Mansfield,

  I read of your recent finds in the New World with great interest. I wish to congratulate you wholeheartedly on your discovery of these noble British creatures. Yes — British, I say! For it is my belief that these vigorous beasts cannot be of American origin. Rather, they were animals from our own proud nation who were merely visiting the New World for a holiday and got trapped by rough weather. This would explain why they were buried in such shallow ground. Had you delved deeper, I have no doubt you would have chanced upon some more pathetic American fossils.

  Congratulations once again and God save the Queen!

  Professor Welton Stanway Kibble

  Dear Miss Mansfield,

  Hooray for your recent finds in the New World. I assume you failed to bring back my bison, coyote, and opossum. But let us not worry about that, as your excellent dinosaurs more than make up for it. But please bear me in mind if you should ever find a dinosaur egg. I’d love to see the look on old Meredith’s face when he spots me scoffing a soft-boiled Stegosaurus for breakfast.

  Yours sincerely,

  Professor Ignacio Baldry Fitzsimons

  I’m so glad Mr. Armstrong is fighting to let members of the public into his museum. If these men represent the scientific elite, my creatures deserve better.

  Saturday, December 17th

  I was sifting through the rocks on the beach this afternoon when Father came running over. He said he had some surprising news, and I assumed he’d sold some of the bones to a tourist for a very high price.

  But he led me home, and I was amazed to find Mr. Armstrong waiting for us. He’d come all the way from London to see me.

  Apparently, my discoveries are the talk of society, and Sir Leopold Pinkerton Hamilton is claiming the entire expedition was his idea. But Mr. Armstrong doesn’t mind, as he’s given him full funding for the museum. He can even afford to give up his job as a surgeon to run it, and the room housing my creatures is to be named after me.

  I must arrange another trip to London soon, so I can see the Stegosaurus and his friends in the “Mansfield Gallery.”

  Then Mr. Armstrong handed me a letter from his friend Professor Godwin at Yale University, which contained the best news of all. Professor Godwin was appalled to hear about Professor Wolf’s behavior, and thought it would almost certainly destroy his reputation if he’d had one left to destroy. But the truth is he’d already made himself the laughing stock of the scientific world with a presentation to the American Geographic Society in October.

  Professor Wolf claimed to have discovered a creature named the “Wolfosaurus Rex.” It had six legs, a skull on the end of its tail, and triangular plates lining its arms. His speech was drowned out by howls of laughter before he could share any of the genuine discoveries.

  When the audience refused to take his find seriously, he suffered a fit of rage and struck some of them with the bones. He was eventually restrained and has since been thrown out of the society and fired from his job at the university.

  This has all worked out even better than I could have hoped. On our last night in Pine Bluff, I had an idea about what to do with the bones I couldn’t fit in the trunks. I took them back to the site and arranged them on the ground to create an odd, imaginary creature with a skull on its tail and plates on its arms. Then I buried them with a thin layer of soil.

  I’d been hoping ever since that Professor Wolf found the bones and fell for my hoax. At best, I thought it would make him look foolish in front of his peers. I didn’t think it would lead to him violently assaulting them.

  Professor Wolf has been cast out by the American scientists, and all his work has been discarded. That means there’ll never be such a thing as “the great wolfosaurus,” “the three-horned wolfosaurus,” or “the long-necked wolfosaurus.” Those creatures will now be known as Allosaurus, Triceratops, and Diplodocus instead. And I shall be credited with discovering them.

  If my fossils are causing a stir in London, I hope it encourages others to travel to the West of America and look for more. I’m sure there are hundreds of other amazing creatures waiting just beneath the ground.

  The dinosaurs were the strangest and most magnificent beasts ever to walk the earth. Now the time has come for us to find them and give them back to the world.

  The End

  The Fossil Hunters

  Although Ann’s diary is set in the year 1870, it is inspired by events that took place throughout the nineteenth century, as fossil discoveries caught the world’s imagination.

  The character of Ann was inspired by Mary Anning, who was born in 1799 and lived in the seaside town of Lyme Regis in Dorset, England. Mary spent her childhood picking up shells and bones on the beach to sell to visitors.

  When she was twelve, she helped her brother Joseph to uncover some strange remains from the nearby rocks. They thought it looked like a large crocodile, but it turned out to be the first complete skeleton of a marine reptile named Ichthyosaur. They managed to sell the fossil for twenty-three pounds (or about thirty-one US dollars), a huge sum of money for a poor family.

  Mary went on to great success as a fossil hunter. She was highly skilled at removing bones from the rocks without damaging them. Among her most famous finds were a marine reptile called Plesiosaur and a flying reptile called a Pterosaur.

  Mary died of cancer in 1847, and interest in her story has grown since her death. Despite having little money and no formal training, she became one of the most important women in the history of science.

  But Mary wasn’t the only remarkable fossil hunter in England. Gideon Mantell was a country doctor with an interest in geology. In 1822 he discovered some unusual teeth that he believed came from a huge creature that resembled the iguana, which he named Iguanodon. Mantell became obsessed with searching for ancient creatures, and soon gathered the most impressive collection of fossils in the country. But a rival emerged who was determined to outdo him.

  Sir Richard Owen was a talented and ambitious scientist, but he was known for mistreating whoever stood in his way. He claimed many of Mantell’s discoveries as his own and tried to stop Mantell’s research from being published. When Mantell died, Owen even wrote an obituary that played down his achievements.

  But for all his faults, he made a massive contribution to the field. He coined the term “dinosaur,” and he helped found London’s Natural History Museum, which meant ancient fossils could be seen by ordinary members of the public as well as by experts.

  The rivalry between Owen and Mantell might have been fierce, but it was nothing compared to one that developed across the Atlantic. The Bone Wars is the name given to the rush to discover and name dinosaurs in the United States in the late nineteenth century. It was driven by the conflict between Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh. The two scientists began as friends, but they soon became bitter enemies.

  In the late nineteenth century, it became apparent that sites in states such as Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming were extremely rich in fossils. Cope and Marsh competed against each other to see who could uncover the most new species.

  Out in the field, their teams resorted to hurling rocks at each other and destroying bones so their rivals wouldn’t get them. Cope and Marsh insulted each other in print and obsessively pointed out each other’s mistakes. When Cope reconstructed the skeleton of a marine reptile with a long neck and a short tail called the Elasmosaurus, he mistakenly placed its skull on its tail. Marsh did his best to draw attention to Cope’s error and damage his reputation.

  Despite their underhanded tactics, the two men increased the number of known dinosaur species to almost 150, and their discoveries included such well-known di
nosaurs as Stegosaurus, Diplodocus, and Triceratops.

  Although they were sometimes very eccentric characters, the great fossil hunters of the nineteenth century changed the way we think about our world. The extinct creatures they discovered still fascinate us today, as shown by the success of films such as Jurassic Park.

  How do we know about the

  dinosaur hunters?

  When you examine a recent period of history like the nineteenth century, there can be a huge amount of surviving evidence to consider. Between them the dinosaur hunters left thousands of pages of notes, journals, and illustrations. They published papers in scientific journals and their discoveries were written about in newspapers.

  Sometimes the evidence is so vast it can be hard to sift through. For example, Edward Drinker Cope wrote over 1,400 scientific papers. He was so determined to identify new species before his great rival Othniel Charles Marsh that he published his findings at an astonishing rate.

  Photography was commercially introduced in 1839, and many images of the dinosaur hunters survive. Pictures of Othniel Charles Marsh on digs portray him as a fearless explorer, setting out into dangerous territory to discover new species.

  Many of the fossils themselves also survive, and can be viewed in natural history museums around the world.

  Timeline

  225 million years ago

  The first dinosaurs appear, in the Triassic period.

  201 million years ago

  The beginning of the Jurassic period, which saw giant dinosaurs emerge.

  145 million years ago

  The beginning of the Cretaceous period, which saw more diversity in dinosaurs. Interestingly, most of the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park were from this period, so it should really have been called Cretaceous Park.