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6 SCIENCE RED IN TOOTH AND CLAW
第六章 勢不兩立的科學
IN 1787, SOMEONE in New Jersey—exactly who now seems to be forgotten—found an enormous thighbone sticking out of a stream bank at a place called Woodbury Creek. The bone clearly didn't belong to any species of creature still alive, certainly not in New Jersey. From what little is known now, it is thought to have belonged to a hadrosaur, a large duck-billed dinosaur. At the time, dinosaurs were unknown.
1787年，新澤西州有個人——到底是誰，如今似乎已被忘卻——在伍德伯里溪發現一根巨大的大腿骨戳出一處岸邊。那根骨頭顯然不屬于尚存的任何物種，也肯定不是新澤西州的。根據現在掌握的一點情況，人們認為它屬于一只鴨嘴龍，那是一種長著鴨嘴的大恐龍。當時，人們還沒有聽說過恐龍。
The bone was sent to Dr. Caspar Wistar, the nation's leading anatomist, who described it at a meeting of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia that autumn. Unfortunately, Wistar failed completely to recognize the bone's significance and merely made a few cautious and uninspired remarks to the effect that it was indeed a whopper. He thus missed the chance, half a century ahead of anyone else, to be the discoverer of dinosaurs. Indeed, the bone excited so little interest that it was put in a storeroom and eventually disappeared altogether. So the first dinosaur bone ever found was also the first to be lost.
骨頭被送交給當時美國最杰出的解剖學家卡斯帕·威斯塔博士。同年秋天，他在費城召開的美國哲學學會的一次會議上作了描述。威斯塔沒有完全認識到這根骨頭的重要意義，只是小心翼翼地講了幾句不痛不癢的話，大意是，它真是個龐然大物。他就這樣錯過了先于別人半個世紀發現恐龍的機會。實際上，這根骨頭沒有引起多大興趣，后來被放在貯藏室里，最后徹底不見了。因此，歷史上第一根被發現的恐龍骨頭，也是第一根被丟失的恐龍骨頭。
