The barosaur at the entrance hall of the American Museum of Natural History in New York—rearing up on its stout hind legs, its fire-hose neck curling up two stories in fury—is the signature icon for the institution and maybe even for the city itself. It is also a big, bone-faced lie.
"It's a great entrance animal and a great posture for stimulating interest," Bruce Rothschild whispers to me. "But there is no way the animal stood like that."
An energetic man dressed in catalog chinos and a plain dress shirt, its tail mostly out, Rothschild is a descendant of the famous European banking and wine dynasty, and this morning he has flown his private plane in from Pennsylvania to take me on his own tour of the dinosaurs. A medical doctor (of human patients), Rothschild is often sought out these days by paleontologists for his observations about the diseases revealed in bones (the dinosaur kind)—and the subsequent deductions about how these long-extinct creatures might have lived. Thanks to Rothschild, the once obscure field of paleopathology is now bringing a fresh sense of realism to our understanding of ancient life.
"If the animal stood up like that," Rothschild says, "you'd expect to see the same stress fractures that you'd find in a ballet dancer. Stress fractures in the bones of the forefeet. They didn't call them thunder lizards for nothing! Stress fractures should also occur in the lumbar region below the ribs. But they aren't there."
As he looks at the dinosaur's lower back, Rothschild points to his own lumbar region; in his view, the differences between himself, a barosaur, and a ballet dancer are practically marginal. We are all creatures, living and dying, pounding the ground, eating, catching diseases, and recovering from them. The bones of people and dinosaurs endure the history of our actions and allow the acute observer to find, long after our deaths, clues to how our lives were lived.
