Like many Americans, Andrew Carnegie became excited when parties from the American Museum of Natural History collected the remains of large dinosaurs. Reading the New York Journal in November 1898, Carnegie came upon a headline—MOST COLOSSAL ANIMAL EVER ON EARTH JUST FOUND OUT WEST!—accompanied by a drawing of a Brontosaurus standing on its rear legs, trying “to Peep into the Eleventh Story of the New York Life Building.” Carnegie scrawled a note onto the article—“Dear Chancellor, buy this! for Pittsburgh”—and mailed it with a ten-thousand-dollar check to William J. Holland, the newly appointed director of the Carnegie Museum. The steel tycoon had become a dinosaur hunter.

Curiously, the article and the accompanying drawings were entirely based on the discovery of one bone, an eight-foot Brontosaurus (more properly called Apatosaurus) thigh specimen uncovered in Wyoming by the American Museum collector William Reed. Holland met with Reed and signed him to a year’s contract with the Carnegie Museum. In return, Reed gave Holland a dinosaur bone to take back to Pittsburgh and promised to find others.

In 1899 two collectors, J. L. Wortman and Arthur Coggeshall, were sent west to join Reed in Medicine Bow, Wyoming. After a few days of no success, Reed admitted to the others that the Journal article had been based on one bone. It was the only bone he’d ever found at the site.

The collectors were discouraged but vowed to continue. Two months later they had worked their way thirty miles from their original site into the Sheep Creek region of Wyoming. This was geologically a part of the Morrison formation, in which important dinosaur finds had been made before. Finally, on the morning of July 4, 1899, Coggeshall discovered a dinosaur’s toe bone. By afternoon the men had uncovered more bones and realized the find was significant. It was a well-preserved Diplodocus, the most complete found to that time. Because of the date of its discovery, Coggeshall joked that this Late Jurassic beast from 120 million years earlier be called the “Star-Spangled Dinosaur.” Director Holland, however, describing the find in the scientific literature in 1901, chose to honor his patron, officially naming the dinosaur Diplodocus carnegii.

Carnegie was delighted. In later years he was to send the famed collector Earl Douglass west with instructions to “bring back something as big as a barn.” D. carnegii was certainly as big as a barn; at eighty-four feet it was the longest land animal ever found. (It was too big, in fact, to fit inside the Carnegie Museum and was not displayed until 1907.) The millionaire decided to have copies made of “Dippy,” as the skeleton became known, to send all over the world.

This was no simple task, for the Diplodocus skeleton had almost three hundred bones, with twenty-two feet of neck and fifty feet of tail. In life