Here’s a little trivia to drop at your next dinner party: Dippy is not actually a real fossil. The skeleton is a plaster cast of a dinosaur discovered in Wyoming in 1898. The original bones are still in the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh.
Another cool detail: Dippy is 26 meters long (about 85 feet). That’s longer than a tennis court! And despite his size, his brain was the size of a walnut, which always makes for a humble, humanizing fact.
Also, Dippy’s correct species name is Diplodocus carnegii, named after the industrialist Andrew Carnegie, who funded the excavation. So, think of him as a very old, very long piece of corporate philanthropy.
