Whatever happened to the Munich Diplododcus?

Everybody[1] knows that in the early years of the 20th Century, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh sent casts of its iconic Diplodocus around the world. Ten casts, in fact: to London, Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Bologna, St. Petersburg, La Plata, Madrid, Mexico City and Munich. The first nine were all mounted, and most still stand in their original museums. (The London cast has moved around a lot and currently resides in Coventry; the Russian cast has a very strange history and is now in Moscow.)

But what happened to the Munich cast? The story is in Taylor et al. 2015:68 — our new paper! — and it’s strange enough that I’m just going to quote verbatim.

The remaining Diplodocus was completed, boxed, and shipped to Munich’s Bayerische Staatssammlung für Paläontologie und Geologie in November and December of 1934, completing an exchange for fossils received from Germany five years previously (Carnegie Institute 1934:40). On arrival, however, the cast was not mounted, but instead stored in the basement of the Alte Akademie, which also housed the rest of the paleontological collections. The replica was long assumed to have been destroyed during World War II, specifically during a British Royal Air Force bombing in April 1944, along with the Spinosaurus aegyptiacus holotype BSP 1912 VIII 19 and other dinosaur remains from Egypt. However, the cast had been removed from the building before the bombing raid, and while the elements themselves were not destroyed, the record of where they had been moved to was lost. It now seems the cast was taken to an abandoned convent on the outskirts of Munich. It is believed that a group of hippies, holding parties in the convent during the 1960s, found some cast bones, took them home, and attracted the attention of authorities who then discovered the crates (sources who wish to remain anonymous, pers. comm. 2022). At any rate, the cast was returned to the Munich museum in 1977 but has remained in storage ever since. Calls for it to be mounted as one of the attractions of a new museum at the Nymphenburg castle came to nothing, partly because the museum authorities favored a lighter and stronger resin cast over the maintenance-intensive plaster one.

In a perfect world, I would like to illustrate this post with photos of the Munich Diplodocus, still in its basement at the time of writing. I do have a few such photos; but the person who sent them to me said that the museum prefers that they not be made public, so I’m going to sit on them. Toss in the fact that much of what we found out for the paper was a personal communication from someone who doesn’t want to be named[2], and the whole thing feels rather mysterious.

I just hope that some day, Louise[3] Carnegie’s final gift will find a home worthy of it, on public display.

[1] Well, OK.Maybe not everyone, but probably most people who read this blog.

[2] I don’t even know myself who that person is: Ilja Nieuwland, one of the co-authors, made the relevant contact.

[3] Yes, Louise. The Munich donation was made in 1934, fifteen years after Andrew Carnegie’s death, and was made possible only by financial assistance from his widow Louise. It was in her honour that Apatosaurus louisae was named. What a great legacy.

References

• Carnegie Institute. 1934. Thirty-seventh annual report of the
  Carnegie Museum. Carnegie Institute, Pittsburgh.
• Taylor, Michael P., Amy C. Henrici, Linsly J. Church, Ilja Nieuwland and Matthew C. Lamanna. 2025. The history and composition of the Carnegie Diplodocus. Annals of the Carnegie Museum 91(1):55–91.

doi:10.59350/svpow.23638