“The Aeroplane Dinosaur of a Million Years Ago“:
Science Reconstructs One of the Weirdest of Prehistoric Monsters with Hollow Bones, Great Air Cavities Within Them and a Series of Enormous Plates Along Its Back For Coasting Through the Air Like Some Gigantic Gliding Machine
Via Brian Switek, who points out that this is, of course, nonsense. “The Fantastic Gliding Stegosaurus”:
Of course, a few ideas have been tossed in the scientific wastebasket. Despite what 19th and early 20th century paleontologists thought, Stegosaurus plates were not protective armor. And, contrary to numerous restorations I saw as a child, Stegosaurus could not waggle or flap its plates around. But the weirdest idea of all was forwarded by paleontology enthusiast and writer W.H. Ballou in 1920. Stegosaurus plates were not armor, heat regulators, or flashy ornaments, Ballou wrote, but were wings that allowed the dinosaur to glide.
Ballou’s article appeared in the Utah’s Ogden Standard-Examiner. And, fortunately for fans of bizarre fossil ideas, a large illustration of flying Stegosaurus graces the piece. One stegosaur crouches to take off, another perches on a rock, and a third buzzes a prehistoric human. (Ballou pointed out in the article that humans originated after dinosaurs, but apparently the artist decided to take some historical license.) This ungainly and aerodynamically-challenged dinosaur, the paper said, was the “Father of All the Birds.” “Crude aeroplane or glider as the Stegosaur was, the principle of all flight was there in the parallel rows of flaps upon his back,” Ballou wrote, concluding, “Certainly he was the factory in which the first bird was built.”
There wasn’t any scientific evidence behind this. While Ballou mentioned the recent discovery of the lovely Stegosaurus skeleton now on display at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History as the inspiration for the idea, the wild notion seems to have been entirely his. The vision of swooping stegosaurs isn’t attributed to any paleontological authority.
