On 12 April 1878, a telegram was sent to the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels. It read: ‘Major discovery bones in fault Bernissart coal mine STOP pyrite deterioration STOP send Depauw to arrive Mons station tomorrow 8 AM STOP will be there STOP urgent STOP Gustave Arnaut.’ The bones turned out to belong to 29 iguanodon dinosaurs.
They were brought back to Brussels in 37 cartloads and stored in the Nassau Chapel on the Mont des Arts. The Belgian palaeontologist Louis Dollo laboured for several years to assemble the nine skeletons in the chapel, using a system of pulleys to hold the bones in place while he worked out where they went. He concluded that the dinosaurs had all died at the same time in a bog during the Jurassic period, but the cause of their death remains a mystery.
The Museum of Natural Sciences created a special prehistoric hall where the dinosaurs were put on display. But Dollo had made a mistake. He assumed that the dinosaurs stood on two legs, whereas scientists are now fairly certain that they went around on four legs. One of Dollo’s skeletons has been corrected, but the others remain standing.
Derek Blyth’s hidden secret of the day: Derek Blyth is the author of the bestselling “The 500 Hidden Secrets of Belgium”. He picks out one of his favourite hidden secrets for The Brussels Times every day.
