Henry Fairfield Osborn, head curator of the Vertebrate Paleontology Department of the American Museum of Natural History, soon to be elected President of the Board of Trustees of the same institution, sat at his desk and considered the world as he saw it.
“I’m real,” he announced. “I’m a real person that really existed. Whoo-eee, I am. I didn’t say this though – or that, did I? I’m also a big ol’ racist and an eager advocate of eugenics. Yessir. Yessir.”
“Mister Osborn,” said Barnum Brown with the sort of patience only available to a man who stared at rocks for a living, “you said you were done with showing instead of telling. That’s why you paid me, remember?”
“Oh! I DO remember!” said Osborn, nodding eagerly. “I paid you a lot of money to go find something we could show the public instead of telling them. I did, I did. ‘Go out there, Mr. Brown, and find me a big beautiful skeleton that we can exhibit to the public and charge them five cents a head to gawk at!’ That’s what I said, didn’t I? Anyways, you’re telling me instead of showing me your own self! Didn’t you find anything?”
“Well, we found something alright, but it wasn’t quite a skeleton,” said Brown. “Nothing like, say, that set of Miocene peccary molars sticking out from under your carpet.”
“Under my wha – ah.”
“Yes, right there. Just give me a moment with a trowel and we’ll have him out in a jiffy.”
“Well done, Brown! Your knack clearly hasn’t faded. So anyways, what’s all this fuss about what you found that wasn’t a skeleton?”
“We found a living, breathing, drinking, eating, defecating, aging, healthy-and-robust living specimen, Mr. Osborn. She’s parked outside.”
Henry Fairfield Osborn, who in a little over ten years would eagerly write multiple prefaces for a book Adolf Hitler called ‘his Bible,’ ran to the window and squinted outdoors. “Ah! So it is, so it is. Good god, Brown, is that thing fifty feet long? She’s taking up a LOT of parking space.”
“Forty at least. We stopped trying to measure her with tape when she kept eating it. That costs money.”
“Sensible, sensible, sensible,” mused Osborn. “And fifteen feet at the shoulder?”
“Twelve foot or so at the hip. Same problem.”
“Remarkable. Well, I’d better describe it then. Fetch me a pen.”
“Sure thing,” said Brown, who had just dropped a lit stick of dynamite into the drawer of Osborn’s desk. A loud BANG emitted, and from the smoke and rubble the paleontologist excavated a pen, some paper, and a perfectly preserved Triceratops skull. “Apologies for the smoke, Mr. Osborn. Had a hunch.”
“Yes, well, these sorts of things happen,” muttered Osborn, scribbling frantically. “HEY, WHOEVER’S LISTENING TO ME AT THIS MOMENT – PUT A STAGE TOGETHER IN THE MAIN HALL, WON’T YOU? Skeletal sketch….eh, that’ll do it for now. Size…..big…bigger than that… sex…. No thank you – hah, remember that one, Brown? Cope taught me that one…. and name. Name. Name, name, name, name. Hmm. Needs something big. Something mighty. Something stupendous in a headline and on a plaque and on a mural. Something that’ll make an artist’s pen shake, that’ll really slice the brisket, if you know what I mean.”
“We fed her fifty pounds of brisket a day to make it home alive, I know exactly what you mean. Swallowed it nigh-whole.”
“Wow, now THERE’S an expense. She ate like a king, eh? Like a king. Oh. Hmm. Hmmmmmm. Yes, I have a name now. RIGHT THAT STAGE UP YET? IT’D BETTER BE, I’M GOING TO BE ON IT IN THREE MINUTES.” Osborn stood up and dusted off his jacket. “Well then, Mr. Brown, how do I look?”
“Like the cofounder of the American Eugenics Society,” said Brown truthfully, now elbow-deep in the wainscoting, hammering away with a pick at the freshly-exposed vertebrae of a pantodont.
“Well yes OBVIOUSLY, but what about right now, at this very moment?”
“Like the cofounder of the American Eugenics society heading downstairs to unveil the greatest and most sensational wonder the world has ever seen?”
“Excellent. Oh and SOMEONE GET ME A CROWD WE NEED AN AUDIENCE JUST PULL ‘EM IN OFF THE STREET alright let’s go.”
***
By the time the two men were downstairs a stage had been hastily assembled along with a crowd – the former by the latter, judging from the audience’s unusually high concentration of burly men with overalls, newsboy hats, steel lunchboxes, and big steel girders slung over their arms. Still, there were more than enough mobsters, molls, dames, wise guys, jabronis, palookas, mooks, hard cases, bad apples, chumps, goons, schmucks, shmendriks, paper boys, shoeshine kids, and guys selling hot dogs out of carts to fill out all the necessary elements of a proper cross section of New York. Already they grew restive.
“’Ey, what’s the holdup?”
“Fuggadabouddit!”
“Hey asshole! I’m talkin’ to YOU!”
“Siddown and shaddup!”
Henry Fairfield Osborn mounted the stage. Behind him, squinting and baring its teeth a little in the spotlights, anchored by comically large chains, stood a forty-foot-plus carnivorous reptile.
“Ladies and gentlemen!” he called. “I am Henry Fairfield Osborn! I am an expert on vertebrate paleontology! I am a head curator at this institution! I am capable of extremely advanced and esoteric pseudoscientific racism and someday very soon, god willing, I will send men to labour under the sun of the Gobi desert in service of those beliefs! And I stand before you now to ask you the most pressing question imaginable: did all of you pay five cents to be in here?!”
Barnum Brown coughed.
“Right yes and also I have named the beast behind you – the great and magnificent creature that you all have better have paid five cents to see today – the titan of terror – the fossil that walks – the king of the cretaceous – the monster from Hell Creek – the sultan of the saurian – an animal so powerful and outstanding that I had to use both Greek AND Latin to name it…… Ultimateosauris láktismaclunes!”
Absolute silence reigned.
“’Láktismaclunes’ translates to ‘kicks butt,’ I believe,” said Osborn cheerfully. “Why aren’t you clapping?”
“You misspelled ‘saurus,’” said Brown. He scratched at his hat awkwardly and six opalescent trilobites fell out.
“Youse mugs cans’t even use no dictionary!” shouted someone from the crowd. “It should be ‘κλοτσιάclunes!”
“They’s using the ancient form, ya moron!”
“Aw, blow it out your kazoo!”
“Please!” called Henry Fairfield Osborn, now grown vexed. “Order, people! Despite my firm belief that many if not all of you are intellectually lesser than me by your descent from what I have predecided to be inherently inferior ethnic groups, we are still all Americans and you still all have five cents and because of that we all now can come together in this moment and celebrate my naming of-”
But it was too late. Concealed until now by the cover of the growing hubbub, a rogue construction crew jumped into action, demolished the dinosaur’s comically large chains, and began building the Empire State Building nearly three decades ahead of schedule.
“Stop! Stop!” screamed Osborn, scrabbling ineffectually at the burgeoning foundations with his bare hands. “Brown! Do something!”
Barnum Brown shrugged on his fur coat (sending three Diplodocus skeletons stuffed in its pockets clattering to the ground), lit a cigarette, used that cigarette to light every stick of dynamite in his fur coat, then hurled them all in the air and hid behind his hat.
“You did say ‘do something,’” he said later, when the smoke had cleared and the ceiling had finished caving in. He inserted a toothpick into his mouth and wiggled it with great care and precision.
“Yes,” mourned Osborn, now draped despondently over the ruins of the stage and mopping the dust from his brow with a pocket-sized klan hood, “but something less expensive would’ve been nice. Now we’re all out of anything to show. What will we exhibit, Brown?”
“Well, how would this do?” asked Brown, pulling loose the toothpick, along with two reasonably-complete skeletons of a forty-foot-long hypercarnivorous Cretaceous theropod dinosaur.
“Barnum, you devil – what on earth were those doing in there?”
“Leftover from when we were digging at Hell Creek, I bet,” said Brown, who was gently probing the joint of his jaw for any stray teeth that didn’t belong to him. “I’m a real rockhound, and sometimes I get more than a taste for my work, you know? A dog with a bone, a paleontologist with a mineralized skeleton.”
“Fair enough, fair enough, all is forgiven,” mused Osborn, running his fingers lovingly over the railroad-spike teeth (oh, if his railroad-owning father could see them!). “Yes, and I’ll not misspell the name on this one, oh no no no. Still, it’s a pity to lose the original beast. Did you see where it went in all the hullabaloo?”
“No, said Brown, idly plaster-jacketing and cataloguing the single gigantic footprint that was all the evidence remaining of their brief guest, “but I suspect she’s gone to do the same thing the audience has: build a new life in a new century.”
“But it’s a giant animal loose in the greatest city on earth!” protested Osborn as he kicked the twisted remnants of the chains out the door onto the sidewalk. “It’ll stick out like a sore thumb. No, Barnum, I’m afraid your romantic fantasy is false: it’s simply too unrealistic to be true.”
“Hey pal,” said an irritable pedestrian, the head of a procession of dozens carrying a twenty-foot gorillia in a reinforced steel cage, “We’re walkin’ here!”
“Blow it out your clunes, gentlemen!”
“Only if you yank your head outta yours first, creep!”
“Shaddup! And don’t touch that chain or you owe me five cents!”
***
Regina Clunes (?-1949) was a New York hot dog vendor famous for serving the patrons of the American Museum of Natural History.[1][2] She married Heinrich Adelman in 1909, and the two had six children.[1] Although she was a forty-three-foot-long carnivorous theropod dinosaur from the late Maastrichtian of Hell Creek, it is a matter of taxonomic debate as to whether or not she should be classified under Tyrannosaurus rex or under the nomen dubium of Ultimateosauris láktismaclunes (sic).[2][3][4][5][6]