All the single ladies! Just the ones historically actually. Today’s solo female-in-the-wild is one of many female paleontologists. Annoyingly many books about the history of paleontology leave out most if not all of female contribution. Well, this historian has a bone to pick about that!
Mignon Talbot is one of my absolute favorite paleontologists. She also happened to discover my favorite dinosaur. If you are sitting here thinking that adults shouldn’t have favorite dinosaurs; get out of my article.
Talbot worked as a professor in the all girl’s college in Mount Holyoke, MA. She was taking a walk one day with her sister and discovered the Podokesaurus Holyokenis quite accidentally. She happened to see an anole is a cliff face on their walk. This anomaly was a small curled up dinosaur estimate at 18cm long. Sadly the skull was not with the rest of the skeleton. It most likely was hit by scavengers and it may not have been fossilized at all depending on where it ended up.
What I find interesting about her discovery is that any writing about Talbot does not call her Dr. Talbot but instead miss Talbot removing her education and identifying her as an unmarried woman. Feminism aside. the Podokesaurus would eventually become the state dinosaur of Massachusetts. If you did not realize that states can have state dinosaurs, it is time to look up your state to see if it’s as cool as Massachusetts. If you are not in the United states you may be out of luck.
Talbot went to write a paper on her discovery and mentioned multiple times to mount Holyoke that her discovery should be moved to Yale in their storage. Unfortunately, before the dinosaur could be moved, a great fire broke out burning all of the artifacts that happen to be kept in this particular side of Mount Holyoke. luckily the Podokesaurus specimen had been casted so there are multiple casts that are still around today. As far as academics are aware, no other discoveries of Podokesaurus have been found. Dr. Talbot would go on teaching until eventually she died in 1950.
If you happen to enjoy this snippet on paleontology, let me know and I can dig more stuff up!! -Chelsey Knyff.
Talbot, Dr. Mignon, Mount Holyoke College, Archives and Special Collections, South Hadley, MA