History of A. Fragillimus
Amphicoelias fragillimus was collected by Oramel Lucas, a fossil collector employed by E. D. Cope, shortly after he was hired by Cope in 1877. Lucas discovered a partial vertebra (the neural arch and spine) of the new sauropod species in Garden Park, north of Cañon City, Colorado, close to the quarry that yielded Camarasaurus. The vertebra was in poor condition, but astonishingly large, measuring 1.5 metres (4.9 ft) up to 2.7 metres (8.9 ft) in height. Lucas shipped the specimen to Cope in the spring or early summer of 1878, and Cope published it as the holotype specimen (catalogue number AMNH 5777) of a new species, A. fragillimus, that August. The name derives from the Latin fragillimus ("very fragile"), referring to the delicateness of the bone produced by very thin laminae (vertebral walls). As revealed in Cope's notebooks, which he recorded based on Lucas' report on excavation site locations in 1879, the specimen came from a hill south of the Camarasaurus quarry now known as "Cope's Nipple." While Cope originally wrote that the site belonged to the Dakota Formation (mid-Cretaceous in age), the presence of dinosaurs such as Camarasaurus in the same rocks indicates that they probably belong to the Morrison Formation, which places the age of the site at 150 million years ago in the late Jurassic period, specifically the Tithonian age. A gigantic fossilized femur was also recovered in close proximity to the vertebra, and may have belonged to A. fragillimus.
Read more about this topic: Amphicoelias
Famous quotes containing the words history of and/or history:
“Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.”
—Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)