The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania has the world's finest and most complete collection of dinosaur fossils in the world. The earliest dinosaur in the collection was Diplodocus carnegii, whose first bones were discovered July 4, 1899, at Sheep Creek, Wyoming. Andrew Carnegie, an industrialist and philanthropist, financed the dig in an act of one-upmanship after he read an item in the New York Journal and Advertiser announcing the " Most Colossal Animal Ever on Earth Just Found Out West". Affectionately dubbed "Dippy" by the public, the dinosaur made its Pittsburgh debut in 1907, the first in Dinosaur Hall. In following years, Carnegie had casts made of Diplodocus for King Edward VI of England, and the governments of museums in Berlin, Madrid, Bologna, La Plata, Vienna, St. Petersburg, Mexico City and Paris. There is a famous life-size replica of the Diplodocus in front of the museum.
Diplodocus was one of the largest dinosaurs ever discovered. It was the longest land animal but not the heaviest. It was a sauropod, a lizard-hipped dinosaur. It was the first famous dinosaur on the planet in the last century. The name Diplodocus means "double beam" and describes a special feature of the backbone. This sauropod was a huge creature with an extremely long neck and a long, whip-like tail. Most of its length was in the neck and tail. It was a herbivore, it ate only plants (grass, leaves and other foliage). It had an elongated snout with nostrils on top of the head and simple peg-like teeth for stripping soft foliage. It had a small head and one of the smallest brains (size of a fist) for a dinosaur of this size. It had slender limbs and hind legs, longer than the front legs; it gave him access to both low and high growing plants. It was quadrupedal, it moved slowly on four column-like legs. All legs had five-toed (like elephant); one toe on each foot had a thumb claw, probably for protection.
In the book of Job in the Bible (Job 40:15-24) it talks about a creature called "behemoth". The description given of this creature matches a lot to the description given of Diplodocus and other sauropod dinosaurs. Scientists have recently discovered that dinosaurs especially sauropod dinosaurs keep their tails up in the air and do not drag them as previously thought. This matches the Scripture in Job 40:17 "He moveth his tail like a cedar". Cedar trees are large straight trees of the conifer family. Scientists believed they used their tails as a counterbalance to keep from falling over. Diplodocus's tail matches this description.
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