Conservation highlights from the Vertebrate Paleontology Archive

The collaboration and exchange of information between scientists is one of the most interesting facets of our collections. Examples of collaboration can be found in nearly all of our collections, and one of my favorite parts of processing archival collections is falling into rabbit holes of the stories behind the items we find.  

In December, while processing the papers of William Diller Matthew, who was a curator in the Vertebrate Paleontology and Geology departments, I discovered an envelope containing a piece of paper that had been thickly folded several times within an unassuming folder of correspondence. It was extremely brittle, making it too difficult to even open and identify it. Fortunately, the labeled envelope and the accompanying letter provided some context: In September 1913, Charles H. Hitchcock wrote to William Diller Matthew enclosing a “gem” that they had previously discussed, a drawing of a trackway of Macropterna vulgaris footprints which had been published in the 1858 Ichnology of New England by his father, Edward Hitchcock.  

It took a few weeks before we were able to fully investigate the drawing – we brought it first to Barbara Rhodes and Paula Schrynemakers in the Conservation Lab in the Main Library so that it could be treated before fully unfolding and viewing it. 

In their words:  

The stabilization of the Hitchcock Trackway drawing was challenging, not just because of the extreme brittleness of the paper but also because of its size, a whopping 59 by 63 inches! It is irregularly shaped and made of multiple pieces of machine-made paper that had been glued and sewn together.  

This giant drawing, folded into a package approximately 7 ½ by 8 ½ inches and stored in a legal-size file folder, was brought to the AMNH Library’s Conservation Laboratory so that it could be unfolded without causing further damage. The folds were very brittle, and too vulnerable to further tearing to be opened without first relaxing the paper with gentle humidification.” 

We laid the drawing unopened on a plastic grid lined with a piece of heavy Reemay (spun-bonded polyester) underneath it as a support. We then humidified it above a very shallow bath of deionized water.  

We placed a plexiglass cover over the bath and the folded drawing was left to relax for an hour, after which the package was subsequently unfolded two more times until it was safe to remove from humidification and, finally, completely unfolded onto a very large table. 

The heavy creasing and planar distortions of the paper made it clear that the goal of our treatment should be to stabilize, repair and flatten the drawing so it could be photographed and stored flat.  

All the repairs were made on the verso using rice starch paste and small strips of tengujo, an extremely thin, almost transparent tissue made from Japanese mulberry fiber (kozo). 

When we were satisfied that the drawing was sufficiently repaired, flattened and stable enough to move, we attached it at the corners to the inside of an archival corrugated folder measuring 5’ 10 ¾ by 7’ 4 ¾ inches and rehoused it in the library’s art storage area.

This treatment was made possible by generous funding from Patricia E. Saigo, M.D., and painstakingly completed by Paula Schrynemakers. 

The fully opened paper was much larger than we had anticipated – it’s one of the largest original drawings that we’ve encountered in the archive. By viewing it, we were able to match it to figure 4 on Plate XXXVII of Ichnology of New England, which is held in the Vertebrate Paleontology Library and is digitized on the Biodiversity Heritage Library; the book provided some additional context for the drawing. In it, the elder Edward Hitchcock refers to the trackway as a “splendid” and “fine” slab belonging to Dr. John C. Warren, though it was collected by a Mr. Field, likely referring to Roswell Field, a farmer from Gill, Massachusetts, who excavated countless sandstone slabs of dinosaur tracks and fossil fish from the Connecticut River Valley for notable scientists and institutions in the nineteenth century. This particular trackway slab was collected from Lily Pond in Gill, Massachusetts, and also features some tracks of the species Cochlichnus anguineus. 

This was an interesting piece to the puzzle as the AMNH holds the majority of specimens from Warren’s historic collection, purchased from Warren’s family in 1906 using funds from J. Pierpont Morgan. For more information on this purchase and one of the more famous specimens from it, check out archivist Maya Naunton’s blog on the subject. We’d hoped that this would mean we could connect the drawing to a specimen in our collection. Unfortunately, we have few archival materials on the transfer of the Warren collection to the AMNH and lack a complete catalog of items that we received. Additionally, the trackway in the drawing didn’t match any of the trackways in our specimen catalog, so we reached a dead end regarding the whereabouts of the trackway in the drawing, as well as an ultimate reason as to why Charles Hitchcock might have sent his father’s drawing to William Diller Matthew.  

Regardless of the drawing’s journey to the Vertebrate Paleontology Archive, it is an exciting find due to its historical significance, and we are happy to have made it available on our Digital Asset Management System. Working primarily in the Connecticut River Valley, Edward Hitchcock was a foundational scientist for the study of ichnology, which looks at “trace” fossils such as footprints, excrement, tooth marks, and burrows. He amassed one of the world’s largest collections of dinosaur footprints before the term dinosaur had even been coined; held at Amherst College, the collection consisted of over 21,000 tracks representing 120 species. Hitchcock was a noted figure of the broad natural sciences, having studied geology, evolution, botany, mineralogy, and zoology, but his early studies on his fossil trackways helped support later pivotal paleontological discoveries, such as the connection between dinosaurs and modern birds, and the existence of bipedal dinosaurs.  

The fragility and sheer size of the drawing presented plain problems for our archive in regards to transporting and storing it; we ultimately transferred the drawing permanently to the Research Library and Conservation lab as they’re better suited to address those problems. There has been one other item that presented similar issues in the recent past, which has a similarly intriguing history and conservation story.  

Howe Quarry, located in Bighorn County, Wyoming, was one of the most important fossil beds discovered in the 20th century. In the early 1930s, Barnum Brown and his team discovered a mass grave containing roughly 4,000 bones in an area just 45 by 65 feet large. The bones belonged to several different species interlocked with one another; team member Roland T. Bird was put to the task of carefully documenting the quarry and the placement of the bones to ensure that individual dinosaurs could be reconstructed once removed. Bird drafted several versions of the quarry map, including a highly detailed copy that was published in popular science magazines and set a new high standard for the documentation of fossil quarries. 

This manuscript draft, which captured the world’s attention in the 1930s, has been held by the AMNH since its creation. It did sit, relatively forgotten, for several years in an attic that stored the majority of the department’s archival materials, before it was identified as a valuable and at-risk item in the early 2000s. Like the Hitchcock trackway drawing, the Howe Quarry map was also brought to the Conservation lab, but due to other projects and funding, it has not been able to be fully treated yet. It is extremely brittle with some major cracks and tears, meaning that it is handled as little as possible. 

In 2010, it was photographed at a high resolution by the Photo Studio and is now publicly available for download on our DAMS, making this fragile piece of paleontology history more readily accessible for research.  

The Hitchcock Macropterna trackway drawing and the Howe Quarry map have more than just their size in common; they are both important representational objects of paleontological history and our department’s place in that history. Finding these “gems” in our archive is always exciting, even when in poor condition, and so we deeply value our collaboration with the Conservation department as their work allows us to dig deeper into the stories behind our archival materials and preserve them for long-term study.  

Sources: 
William B. Ashworth, “Scientist of the Day - Edward Hitchcock,” Linda Hall Library News, February 27, 2018, https://www.lindahall.org/about/news/scientist-of-the-day/edward-hitchcock/. 

Robert L. Hebert et al., “Roswell Field’s Dinosaur Footprints, 1854-1880,” Mount Holyoke College Faculty & Staff Projects, South Hadley, Massachusetts, 2013, https://ida.mtholyoke.edu/items/770e44ef-7f08-4dcb-9ed3-dc6acffc86cd. 

Edward Hitchcock and Massachusetts, Ichnology of New England: a report on the sandstone of the Connecticut Valley, especially its fossil footmarks, made to the government of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (William White, Printer to the State, 1958).  

“Howe Quarry,” Wild West Dino Den, n.d., https://www.bighornbasindinos.org/howequarry. 

Nancy Pick, Curious Footprints: Professor Hitchcock’s Dinosaur Tracks & Other Natural History Treasures at Amherst College (Amherst College Press, 2006). 

Michon Scott, “Edward Hitchcock,” Strange Science, September 10, 2022, https://www.strangescience.net/hitch.htm. 

Emmanuel Tschopp and Mark Norell, “Reconstructing the Specimens and History of Howe Quarry (Upper Jurassic Morrison Formation; Wyoming),” American Museum Novitates, no. 3956 (June 2020), https://digitallibrary.amnh.org/items/8c4ff3a4-108e-43a9-b60d-5f458462c2c2.