1905, A Big Year

1905 was a big year for Megacerops. Richard S. Lull, of the Massachusetts Agricultural College (presently UMass Amherst), published his description and plates of a fossil he named Megacerops tyleri in the Journal of Geology for the first time. Thirty five years before that the genus Megacerops was originally named and described by Joseph Leidy. Osborn discussed Leidy's description in his 1902 discussion on the Oligocene titanotheres. Either way, Lull's plates depict a skull and forelimb of the animal, far more than Leidy had in his initial descriptions. Prior to this, in the same compile volume, Lull detailed the restoration of the animal. This restoration was effected in clay and features a photograph of the skull, as opposed to the line drawings in the plates of the description. Papers and studies continue to be published, of course. The last well detailed description of a new specimen that I would recommend reading was published in 1995 in the Journal of Paleontology and introduced the new species Megacerops kuwagatarhinus from the White River beds of Montana.