Haplocanthosaurus delfsi

In the summer of 1954, an expedition from The Cleveland Museum of Natural History traveled to the American West for a three-week fossil-hunting expedition. The team was made up of four young men from Cleveland: Yale University junior Edwin Delfs and high-school students Wesley Williams, Bill West and Dick Jones.

They rendezvoused in Utah with then-Museum Director William E. Scheele and Dr. J. LeRoy Kay of the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh and spent four days learning about the geology of the Western states. Kay gave Delfs, Williams, West and Jones leads on possible dinosaur bone deposits in Colorado and the young men departed to follow up on them.

Those leads went nowhere. But by chance the Museum team met up with a group of Louisiana State University geology students, who told them about dinosaur bones they’d seen. They directed the young men to a location along Oil Creek within the Garden Park Fossil Area—the site of the famous "Bone Wars" of the 19th century between rival paleontologists Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh.

There, the Museum team found the partial remains of a fossilized sauropod, one of the immense, long-necked plant eaters that dominated the dinosaurian world throughout the Jurassic Period (roughly 200 million to 145 million years ago). They began excavations and called for assistance. They were eventually joined by Museum staff and volunteers.

The entire specimen was removed from the rock in three summer field seasons. The Museum team used everything from hand tools to heavy equipment and controlled explosives to remove the fossil dinosaur bone from the surrounding shale and sandstone. The site also yielded the fossil remains of an ancient crocodile and turtle.

Fossil material removed from the ground was sent back to Cleveland for preparation and study. In all, 8 tons of matrix and bone were shipped from the site.

The Dinosaur

The articulated skeleton had been found lying on its left side. Nearly 60 percent of it was recovered, except for the skull. This is common with sauropods skulls, which were relatively small and fragile and were often lost or destroyed before the decaying carcass underwent fossilization.

With help from scientists at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and American Museum of Natural History, the specimen was identified as a member of the genus Haplocanthosaurus. These sauropods had a single projection on the top of each vertebra where other genera had two. (Haplocanthosaurus means "single-spined lizard.")

Like other sauropods, including its better-known cousin Apatosaurus, Haplocanthosaurus had massive, pillar-like legs and a long neck and tail. In life, it probably was more than 72 feet long and 14 feet tall at the hips. It likely weighed about 25 tons. It had a small head and jaws filled with blunt teeth that it used to graze on plants.

Happy needed a massive amount of plant material to sustain itself. It could not have ground the plants it ate; instead it probably relied on a stomach full of gastric stones and gut full of beneficial bacteria to digest its food.

The extensive research needed to establish The Cleveland Museum of Natural History's Haplocanthosaurus as a new species was completed in 1988. Paleontologists John S. McIntosh of Wesleyan University of Connecticut and Michael Williams, then Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History, co-authored the article that fully described the species and assigned it its name, Haplocanthosaurus delfsi, in honor of Edwin Delfs.

Happy at the Museum

In 1961, Happy made its public debut at The Cleveland Museum of Natural History. The skeleton was first exhibited lying down, as it had been found.

In 1963, Happy re-emerged in its current erect mount. To date, Happy is the only adult Haplocanthosaurus ever found (partial skeletons of two younger animals from the same genus had been found in the Colorado Garden Park region in 1903).

Edwin Delfs, Happy's namesake, made his career in medicine. But he continued to participate in digs until his death in 2002. The Museum is grateful for Delfs' contribution and is honored to display the fruits of his labor in the Kirtland Hall of Prehistoric Life.