Dryptosaurus Skeletal Mount

The New Jersey State Museum

The way these carnivorous dinosaurs are posed is an homage to a classic work of paleoart.

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Discovered in 1866 in aNew Jerseymarl pit,Dryptosauruswas the first partially-complete skeleton of a carnivorous theropod dinosaur in North America.

The paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope originally named the speciesLaelapsafter a hunting dog from Greek mythology. But after it was discovered that the taxonomic name had previously been used for a species of beetle, Cope’s paleontological rival Othniel Marsh renamed the dinosaurDryptosaurus(from the Greek for “tearing lizard”) in 1877.

Dryptosaurusis a distant and somewhat smaller relative ofTyrannosaurus rex. In the late Cretaceous when both species lived, North America was divided down the middle by an interior sea, which allowedDryptosaurus发展更大的计谋没有竞争in.

ThoughDryptosaurushas fallen into relative obscurity today, it was one of the most popular prehistoric animals in North America in the late 1800s, primarily due to a painting called “Leaping Laelaps” created by the artist Charles Knight. Knight’s work depicted two of these dinosaurs fighting as active, agile animals—a sharp contrast to other paleoart of the time which illustrated dinosaurs as sluggish, tail-dragging monsters.

In 2014, the New Jersey State Museum honored the theropod with a mount of twoDryptosaurusskeletons posed like the subjects of Knight’s painting. Since the originalDryptosaurusremains are incomplete—consisting of a partial jaw, hips, legs, claws and some vertebrae—many parts of the two skeletal reconstructions are estimates based on closely related tyrannosaurids such asAppalachiosaurus, whose fossils have been found in the southeasternUnited States.

Know Before You Go

The New Jersey State Museum is open Tuesday to Sunday from 9 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. Admission is free, though donations are greatly appreciated. TheDryptosaurusreconstruction is located on the second floor of the museum in the “Written in the Rocks” exhibit. Street parking is available near the museum, along with a limited number of free visitor spots in the nearby State House garage.

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