Sprawling Diplodocus, 1910
Not everyone agreed with Osborn, Cope, and Knight that dinosaurs were nimble browsers and agile hunters. Oliver Hay, in particular, thought that making dinosaurs stand and act like mammals was an abuse of anatomical fact. Hay argued that ornithopods like Trachodon must have had a very wide stance, so that the legs could clear the pendulous abdomen, and consequently they must have waddled rather than strode. And he took particular issue with reconstructions of Diplodocus--not just Knight's rearing version, but also Hatcher's upright, elephantine restoration. After studying the structure of the upper leg and the pelvis, Hay concluded that the legs of Diplodocus must have splayed out like those of a crocodile. For this paper he commissioned a drawing from Mary Mason Mitchell to reflect his views of diplodocid posture. There are four individuals in all in the drawing; the two in the foreground are quite unmistakable; there is a third that is swimming in the water, with just its head and back visible, and a fourth lies sprawled out on the distant bank (see detail at right).
Hay first proposed his ideas on Diplodocus posture in 1908, and he received ardent, and perhaps unwelcome, support from an anatomist in Germany, Gustav Tornier. Tornier and Hay were then attacked rather scathingly by William J. Holland in 1910.
Slinking Diplodocus, 1909
Although Hay published his famous "Sprawling Diplodocus Landscape" in 1910, he had made his first argument for a splayed-out Diplodocus in 1908, and this first article received an enthusiastic reception from a German anatomist, Gustav Tornier. In this 1909 paper, Tornier attempted in great detail to reconstruct the Diplodocus leg bones so that the elbow/knee joints were at a nearly ninety degree angle. And at the end of the article, there was attached a striking folding plate (see below), with a new Diplodocus carnegii skeletal restoration according to Tornier's anatomical re-evaluation. William J. Holland at the Carnegie Museum took great exception to Tornier's reconstruction, and in an article in 1910, Holland rebutted Tornier (and Hay) point by point.
Holland Makes Hay, 1910
Before publishing this paper, Holland presented it to the Annual Meeting of the Geological Society of America, and he illustrated his talk with projected images from a stereopticon. One of the images was what Holland called the “skeletal monstrosity perpetrated by Tornier. As a contribution to the literature of caricature the success achieved is remarkable.” He must have brought the house down when he got to figure 9, which shows how the Tornier version of Diplodocus must have moved.