Allen A. Debus sculpted this sculpture of the way the putative horned dinosaur Agathaumas sylvestris was believed to have looked back in the late 19th Century, based upon a vintage sculpture and subsequent painting by artist Charles R. Knight. Actually, “Agathaumas” was a “headless wonder” based on scrappy fossil material probably pertaining to the well-known ceratopsian dinosaur Triceratops.
Knight’s painting of Agathaumas, done in1895 under the direction of paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope, reproduced in this “jigsaw puzzle” souvenir postcard from the American Museum of Natural History, manufactured by Whitehall Games, Inc., of Newton, MA; and a “Dinosaur Series” trading card from Nu-Cards (1961).
Although mostly a hypothetical dinosaur, Agathaumas turned up in several early motion pictures. Here Willis O’Briend animates an Agathaumas for the unfinished RKO movie project Creation (1932).
Small pewter Agathaumas figure, one of a set of such miniature prehistoric animals from Ral Partha (1980s).
A rubber ceratopsian dinosaur seemingly modeled in part after Knight’s Agathaumas painting and sculpture, from Creatoloy in Irving, Texas, but made in China.
