Meeting Your First Dinosaur: Museums, Extinctions, and Fossil Restorations in 19th-century Philadelphia

Your first memory of a prehistoric creature may be a T-Rex from Jurassic Park or Little Foot from The Land Before Time. For many Philadelphians in the 19th century, it was standing up close with a life-size restoration of a Mastodon or a Hadrosaur in local museums. In their society, extinction was a radical new concept that overturned assumptions about an unchanging planet. These physical representations of real, extinct creatures were a portal to imagining the new world of prehistory. This talk will explore how Brock_MaryAnning from Children's Encyclopediapeople in the west dealt with astonishing new discoveries of strange creatures that no longer walked the earth or swam in its oceans and will spotlight three Philadelphia museums that reconstructed these specimens as three-dimensional spectacles for the museum-going public.
About the speaker: Mabel Rosenheck is a writer, lecturer, and historian in Philadelphia. She works in the museum at the Wagner Free Institute of Science and teaches at Temple University, in addition to freelance writing and research. She received her Ph.D. in Media and Cultural Studies from Northwestern University. Samples of her writing can be found at http://www.mabelrosenheck.com/writing  and https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/mabel-rosenheck/.