Summarize the following: The story of how dinosaurs wound up dominating museums in major western cities has its roots in three major phenomena of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The major factors that led to the acquisition, display, and publicity of large saurian specimens in the museums such as the Chicago Field Museum, The Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, Yale's Peabody Museum, and the British Museum of Natural History are found in the changing economic, cultural, and scientific landscape of this time.

NAME_1 lays the reasons for the surge in dinosaur displays in major museums of this time at the feet of several phenomena, but the two most important were

The growth of a new class of extremely wealthy industrialist and banking families that were moving into the social spheres of the old money families that made their trade in mercantile endeavors in cities like New York

Social movements such as progressivism and nationalism that became influential on both sides of the Atlantic, and the changing views on the role of museums, public education, and the interplay of philanthropy and popular markets that evolved as result of these social movements.

Getting Started

Let's start though all the way at the beginning of Paleontology as a field. If you are at all familiar with the history of paleontology you may know a bit about the early fossil discoveries of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Famous discoveries by NAME_2 and the description of dinosauria as a distinct biological class of reptiles by NAME_3 kickstarted the field and first spread public awareness of prehistoric life in Victorian England. These new developments combined with new maritime fossils that were excellently preserved in the UK's rocky shores, geological developments by scientists such as NAME_4, and above all the development of NAME_5's idea of descent with modification via natural selection.

While early paleontological reconstructions were, to be generous, incomplete, here is the earliest reconstruction of iguanodon done by NAME_2, and the more famous reconstructions done for the Crystal Palace Park prehistoric exhibition put together by NAME_6 they were still enormously popular with audiences

The early field of paleontology was limited in scope largely to the affluent sections of the British educated and elite classes, figures like NAME_5, NAME_2, NAME_3, and the like were members of the minor gentry, educated (NAME_7 and NAME_8 