The most complete dinosaur skeleton ever found had been discovered in New Jersey before the Civil War, but while it had been interesting to scientists, the general public took little notice.

With the end of the war, that was about to change when a story, dated 1868, from the Friends Intelligencer stated, “For several years there have been lying, in a case in a dark recess in the Museum of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, the remains of an immense extinct herbivorous saurian.