New suspect in the greatest act of vandalism in the history of dinosaur study

Researchers from the University of Bristol are rewriting the history of paleontology’s darkest and most bizarre event.

Vandals with sledgehammers destroyed skeletons and models intended for display in New York’s first dinosaur museum before it was even finished in 1871.

For more than a century, historians believed William “Boss” Tweed, New York’s most powerful political figure at the time, was to blame. But now researchers have revisited the crime — and point to a new suspect in what they call the “greatest act of vandalism in the history of dinosaur study.”

However, a recent paper by Victoria Coules of Bristol’s Department of History of Art and Professor Michael Benton of Bristol’s School of Earth Sciences sheds new light on the incident and, in contrast to earlier accounts, identifies who was actually behind the order and what drove them to such wanton destruction—an odd man by the name of Henry Hilton, the Treasurer and VP of Central Park.

Paleontology was still in its infancy in 1871, and new discoveries made all over the world stoked curiosity about the enormous extinct animals. The Paleozoic Museum was to feature the work of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, an English natural history artist who galvanized interest in dinosaurs in the United States with the display of the world’s first mounted dinosaur skeleton in Philadelphia in 1868.

Hawkins used fossil evidence to create full-sized models for elaborate dioramas in preparation for the New York Museum. However, the museum was canceled in 1870 by the Tweed-controlled Central Park board. Vandals destroyed all of Hawkins’ models, casts, and studio a few months later.

“It’s all to do with the struggle for control of New York City in the years following the American Civil War (1861-1865),” said Victoria Coules. “The city was at the center of a power struggle—a battle for control of the city’s finances and lucrative building and development contracts.”

As the city grew, the iconic Central Park was taking shape. More than just a green space, it was to have other attractions, including the Paleozoic Museum.

Professor Benton explains, “Previous accounts of the incident had always reported that this was done under the personal instruction of ‘Boss’ Tweed himself, for various motives from raging that the display would be blasphemous, to vengeance for a perceived criticism of him in a New York Times report of the project’s cancelation.”

“Reading these reports, something didn’t look right,” Coules said. “At the time Tweed was fighting for his political life, already accused of corruption and financial wrong-doings, so why was he so involved in a museum project?” She added, “So we went back to the original sources and found that it wasn’t Tweed—and the motive was not blasphemy or hurt vanity.”

The American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) and the Central Park Zoo were two additional projects in Central Park that were simultaneously under construction, which complicated the situation. But, as Professor Benton explained, “drawing on the detailed annual reports and minutes of Central Park, along with reports in the New York Times, we can show that the real villain was one strange character by the name of Henry Hilton.”

Coules adds, “Because all the primary sources are now available online, we could study them in detail—and we could show that the destruction was ordered in a meeting by the real culprit, Henry Hilton, the Treasurer and VP of Central Park—and it was carried out the day after this meeting.”

Professor Benton concluded, “This might seem like a local act of thuggery but correcting the record is hugely important in our understanding of the history of paleontology. We show it wasn’t blasphemy or an act of petty vengeance by William Tweed, but the act of a very strange individual who made equally bizarre decisions about how artifacts should be treated—painting statues or whale skeletons white and destroying the museum models. He can be seen as the villain of the piece but as a character, Hilton remains an enigmatic mystery.”

Hilton was already notorious for other eccentric decisions. When he noticed a bronze statue in the Park, he ordered it painted white, and when a whale skeleton was donated to the American Museum of Natural History, he had that painted white as well. Later in life, other ill-judged decisions included cheating a widow out of her inheritance, squandering a huge fortune, and trashing businesses and livelihoods along the way.

First records of human kissing may date back 1,000 years earlier than estimated

Humanity’s earliest record of kissing dates back about 4,500 years in the ancient Middle East, 1,000 years earlier than previously thought, according to researchers.

Scientists have highlighted evidence that suggests kissing was practised in some of the earliest Mesopotamian societies and documented in ancient texts from 2500BC that have been largely overlooked.

In an article published in the journal Science, researchers also cited evidence that kissing may have contributed to the spread of orally transmitted diseases such as cold sores.

Although research had suggested that friendly or familial kissing was a common behaviour between humans across time and geography, romantic-sexual kissing was not thought to be culturally universal.

Researchers said the findings suggest kissing was considered an ordinary part of romantic intimacy in ancient times across many cultures and did not originate in a specific region, as earlier research had proposed.

A previous hypothesis suggested that the earliest evidence of kissing came from what would be modern-day India in 1500 BC.

Ancient Mesopotamian texts suggest that kissing was something that married couples did, though kissing was also seen as a part of an unmarried person’s desires when in love.

Dr Troels Pank Arbøll, an expert on the history of medicine in Mesopotamia at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, said: “In ancient Mesopotamia, which is the name for the early human cultures that existed between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers in present-day Iraq and Syria, people wrote in cuneiform script [wedge-shaped marks] on clay tablets.

“Many thousands of these clay tablets have survived to this day, and they contain clear examples that kissing was considered a part of romantic intimacy in ancient times, just as kissing could be part of friendships and family members relations.

“Therefore, kissing should not be regarded as a custom that originated exclusively in any single region and spread from there but rather appears to have been practised in multiple ancient cultures over several millennia.”

Studies have shown that bonobos kiss with a romantic-sexual purpose and chimpanzees engage in platonic kissing to manage social relationships. As the closest living relatives to humans, scientists said these practices hint at the ancient presence and evolution of the behaviour in humans.

The researchers also said kissing may have unintentionally played a role in the transmission of pathogens, such as herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1), which causes cold sores and diphtheria, a highly contagious bacterial infection.

It is thought that bu’shanu, a disease described in ancient medical texts, could be the HSV-1 infection. It was found in and around the mouth, which is one of the main signs of the herpes virus.

Dr Arbøll said: “There is a substantial corpus of medical texts from Mesopotamia, some of which mention a disease with symptoms reminiscent of the herpes simplex virus 1.”

However, researchers said these texts cannot be read at face value because they were influenced by a variety of cultural and religious concepts of the time.