Very interesting article! I wonder if the above argument though isn’t slightly missing the central point: If Hitchcock was essentially a creationist, and he had been presented with the modern version of dinosaurs as warm-blooded, active, and often feathered, surely he would have simply argued that dinosaurs were in fact a type of “bird” rather than a type of “reptile” (as he thought in terms of typological categories rather than phylogenetic ones). If we hadn’t changed the basic methods of classification from separate boxes to nested categories, we probably would have done the same by now. So from Hitchcock’s perspective, he would have been proved right by future discoveries. We just happened to have changed the way we name things in such a way that we would now say he was wrong.

Edward Hitchcock was one of America’s first dedicated dinosaur paleontologists. He just didn’t know it. In fact, during the latter part of his career, he explicitly denied the fact. To Hitchcock, the tracks skittering over red sandstone in the Connecti…