Smithsonian Institution Dinosaur Museum/DINOSAUR_MUSEUM.ISO/pc/mswin/archives/hist2.txt

Text File | 1994-06-05 | 15KB | 325 lines

1893
While working for the American Museum of Natural History, Oscar A. Peterson reports
dinosaur bones from the Uinta Basin of Utah.  This report is part of the basis for Earl
Douglass' decision to prospect the area in 1909.

Barnum Brown matriculates as a freshman at the University of Kansas, where he meets
Elmer S. Riggs.  They study under Samuel Wendell Williston, Marsh's former assistant, by
now one of the greatest authorities on fossil reptiles.

Charles H. Sternberg invents the combination of Rice goo and burlap as a field  bandage for
wrapping vertebrate fossils.  Marsh invents plaster-of-paris as a bandage.

George Baur, who works for Marsh, says Ceratosaurus has pathological metatarsals.  This
was known by Marsh but he deliberately didn't mention it but instead says it was normal
fusion of the bones in order to justify its unique nature and make it closer to birds in
morphology.  This was one of the first citations of paleopathology in the literature before
Roy L. Moodie's 567 page treatise, "Paleopathology," published in 1923.

1893
H. F. Osborn pioneers the modern museum concept by selling postcards and photos; using
free-mounts instead of wall-mounts to exhibit fossil vertebrates; and getting rid of
warehouse-style, bulky, glass-front exhibit cases.  He hires Charles R. Knight (1894),
Erwin S. Christman (by 1900), and others to do accurate artwork of the animals for the
scientific papers and the public exhibit galleries.

John Bell Hatcher leaves Yale when O. C. Marsh's federal funding dries up.  William
Berryman Scott, a friend of Cope's, hires Hatcher away from Marsh to collect in the Dakotas
and to be Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at Princeton.

1896
The Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh is founded.

While a senior at Kansas, Barnum Brown meets a field party led by Jacob L. Wortman of the
American Museum of Natural History.  Brown made such a good impression that he was hired
by the museum after he graduated in 1897.

1897
Charles R. Knight paints Dryptosaurus in a "fighting-cock" pose and it becomes the first
painting famous for showing dinosaurs as fully "warm-blooded."

Lawrence Lambe starts collecting dinosaurs on the Red Deer River.  This is the first
systematic collection of dinosaurs by a vertebrate paleontologist in Canada.

Elmer S. Riggs graduates from Kansas, and enters graduate school at Princeton as William
Scott Berryman's student.

Edward Drinker Cope dies of kidney failure at age 57.

1898
Brown, Granger, and Wortman of the AMNH explore the Medicine Bow area of Wyoming.
They decide to explore the next day "by that cabin on the hill."  As they approach the cabin
they realize it is made up of bones!  This becomes the famous BONE CABIN quarry and it
yields 490 specimens of Morrison dinosaurs.

Unhappy at being passed over as the leader of museum expeditions, Jacob L. Wortman leaves
the American Museum of Natural History for the newly opened Carnegie Museum of Natural
History in Pittsburgh.

1899
Charles Othniel Marsh dies of pneumonia at age 67.

John Bell Hatcher is Oscar Peterson's brother-in-law.  Peterson leaves AMNH for Carnegie
in Pittsburgh.  A year later, Hatcher leaves Princeton to join Carnegie as Curator of
Paleontology and Osteology.

1901
Now at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, J. B. Hatcher takes W. H. Utterback with
him to reopen the Marsh quarries at Garden Park, Colorado.

On April 1, under the direction of Charles Emerson Beecher at the Peabody Museum of
Natural History, Yale University, Hugh Gibb finishes the mount of Edmontosaurus (then
called "Trachodon") in a fully erect bipedal pose in full run.  Like Knight's Dryptosaurus,
this mount shows dinosaurs as very active, and not like "cold-blooded" living reptiles.  This
is the first skeleton of real dinosaur bone to be mounted in the western hemisphere, and the
first dinosaur to be mounted at Yale.  During O. C. Marsh's lifetime, none of the dinosaurs
collected was ever mounted, and Beecher thought it was about time.

1902
Barnum Brown discovers the first Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the Hell Creek area of
Montana.  This specimen becomes the type and it is later traded to the Carnegie Museum in
Pittsburgh to save it from possible bombing during World War II.  It is still on exhibit in
Pittsburgh.

Lawrence Lambe publishes the results of his Red Deer River collections.

1904
Ground is broken for the new National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, on June 15.

1907
W. B. Sattler discovers the dinosaurs at Tendaguru, east Africa.

1908
Barnum Brown collects the second (and best) Tyrannosaurus rex skeleton in the Hell Creek
area.  This specimen is put on exhibit in New York and subsequently becomes the most
famous exhibit mount of all the dinosaurs.

Henry Fairfield Osborn is appointed President of the American Museum of Natural History.

1909
A rancher in Alberta tells Barnum Brown about the many dinosaurs on his ranch on the Red
Deer River.

Werner Janensch and the Museum of Natural History of Humboldt University, Berlin, begin
to collect at Tendaguru.  The museum will quarry there for four field seasons, through
1912.

While prospecting for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, on August 17 Earl Douglass
finds dorsal vertebrae of Apatosaurus at Split Mountain, north of Jensen, Utah.  A famous
picture of the bones still encased in the rock matrix includes a white-bearded "old man"
leaning on a shovel.  He is George Goodrich, an Elder in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-
Day Saints, who was helping Douglass prospect and helped in the excavations the first
season.  This specimen is the very same Apatosaurus now on display at Carnegie.  It took
Douglass and his crew six years to quarry this colossal fossil and mount it at Carnegie.
Another seven years was required to excavate the west half of the quarry, and six more
years to do the east half.  Douglass works the quarry for Carnegie from 1909 through the
spring of 1923.  He then spends two years working it for the Smithsonian Institution (SI)
and the University of Utah.  The reconstruction of Diplodocus mounted at the Smithsonian is
from this time, being quarried during the 1923 field season.  The excavations through 1924
touch only the top and sides of the famous hogback ridge where the quarry is now situated.
The present quarry and visitor's center covers only the middle-lower-central part!  Well-
known workers in the "golden-age" at the "Carnegie Quarry" are Earl Douglass and George
Goodrich; and then from the fifties onwards are Tobe Wilkins, Jim Adams, Ted White,
Russell King, and Dan Chure.

1910-1917
Barnum Brown collects along the Red Deer River with very friendly "competition" from the
Sternbergs.  They all get excellent skeletons and help each other a lot.

1910
New National Museum, Smithsonian Institution, is opened to the public on March 17.
Within a year of its opening, there were five mounted skeletons of dinosaurs in the public
galleries, along with various odd bits and pieces like leg bones, skulls, and a papier mÉchÇ
model.

1913
On April 5, Earl Douglass files a mining claim on the federal land where the dinosaur bones
were being excavated at the "Carnegie Quarry" in Utah.  The area had just recently been
thrown open for settlement, and there was concern that a speculator might file a claim of his
own, thus blocking Carnegie from further collecting.

1915
On October 14, President Woodrow Wilson declares the Earl Douglass Quarry (80 acres) as
Dinosaur National Monument.  This action is also designed to keep the Monument free from
homesteaders and mining operations.

1921
The Museum of Paleontology at the University of California is founded.  It will become a
major center for research and produce some of the world's most promising vertebrate
paleontologists.

1923
The Mongolian expeditions of the American Museum of Natural History find the first-known
occurrence of dinosaur eggs.  On July 13, George Olsen reports that he has found some fossil
eggs.  Walter Granger examines the three partly broken specimens and identifies them as
dinosaur eggs.

1924
Earl Douglass leaves the Carnegie Museum of Natural History to teach at the University of
Utah.

1927
Cleveland-Lloyd quarry found in Utah.

William Diller Matthew founds the Department of Paleontology at the University of
California, Berkeley.  At the time, it is the only department in the world just for
paleontology.

1927
Chung Chien Young becomes China's first vertebrate paleontologist.

1929
First center for vertebrate paleontology founded in China.

Carl Wiman describes the first Chinese sauropod, Euhelopus.

1933
Sinclair Oil Company has six enormous dinosaurs made for the Century of Progress
Exposition in Chicago.

1935
Henry Fairfield Osborn dies on November 6.

1940
Raymond B. Cowles, a professor of zoology at UCLA, proposes that dinosaurs became extinct
due to OVERHEATING.  He was a former student of Charles H. Bogert at the American
Museum of Natural History, and helped Bogert and Edwin H. Colbert with their paper on
dinosaur physiology, which appeared in 1946.

1941
Barnum Brown retires from the American Museum in New York.  He is the greatest
collector of dinosaurs of all time.

1942
Rudolf Zallinger begins the "Age of Reptiles" mural at the Peabody Museum of Natural
History, Yale University.

1947
George Whitaker and Edwin H. Colbert of the American Museum of Natural History discover
Coelophysis at the GHOST RANCH quarry in Arizona.  It is the largest mass accumulation of
well-preserved theropods anywhere in the world.

Rudolf Zallinger completes the "Age of Reptiles" mural at the Peabody Museum of Natural
History, Yale University.

1948
The two most notorious skeletons of Coelophysis are found at Ghost Ranch by George
Whitaker and Carl Sorenson of the American Museum of Natural History.  These skeletons
have juveniles inside them suggesting that this genus was cannibalistic.

1949
Rudolf Zallinger wins a Pulitzer Award for his 110 foot mural at the Peabody Museum of
Natural History, Yale University.

1951
First Chinese dinosaur expedition is made.  They find new taxa and vast fossil
deposits in the Shantung area.

1953
The Jurassic hall of dinosaurs is re-opened at the American Museum.

China starts the world's first journal devoted exclusively to vertebrate
paleontology - "Vertebrata Palasiatica."  The Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and
Paleoanthropology is founded.

1959
Osvaldo Reig (a paleontologist) and Victorino Herrera (a goat-herder) discover the second
oldest-known dinosaur, Herrerasaurus, in Argentina.  At the time of their find, it was the
earliest-known dinosaur.

1961
R. L. Liscomb of Shell Oil Company makes the first discovery of dinosaur bones in Alaska at a
site on the Colville River.  The significance of Liscomb's discovery went unnoticed until
1984, when the material was sent to paleontologists of the U. S. Geological Survey.

1962
Petrified Forest National Park created.  It holds many Triassic fossils.

1964
John Ostrom and Grant Meyer find Deinonychus south of Billings in the Big Horn Basin,
Montana.

1968
Bones of therapsids are found in Antarctica which help to prove the theory of plate tectonics.

1969
John Ostrom says dinosaurs were warm-blooded and therefore NOT good indicators of
Mesozoic climate.

1974
Robert Bakker and Peter Galton formally reunite the Saurischia and Ornithischia back into
the DINOSAURIA as an official taxon.

1975
"Scientific American" publishes an article entitled "Dinosaur Renaissance."  It begins a new
era of dinosaur paleontology.

1977
Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, is designated a national landmark.

1978
In Teton County, northwestern Montana, John R. Horner and Robert Makela discover the
first-known nest of baby dinosaurs ever found.

1979
Dinosaur Provincial Park in Alberta designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

1980
The American Association for the Advancement of Science publishes a symposium volume,
entitled "A Cold Look at the Warm-Blooded Dinosaurs."

1982
Stegosaurus stenops is named the state fossil of Colorado.

1983
In a clutch of nineteen eggs of Orodromeus makeli at Egg Mountain in Teton County, Montana,
John R. Horner finds fossilized dinosaur embryos in every egg.  These are the first
unhatched dinosaur embryos ever found.

William Walker discovers Baryonyx in southeast England, the first sickle-clawed theropod
known outside North America.

1984
Liscomb's 1961 dinosaur site in Alaska is relocated and recollected by paleontologists of the
U. S. Geological Survey.  Their findings suggest that dinosaurs lived at high latitudes of about
70 to 85 degrees North, where there was extreme seasonal variation in temperature and
food supply, and that dinosaurs lived there year-round.

1985
Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology in Drumheller, Alberta, opens on September 25.

1986
Sino-Canadian agreement is made for a five-year plan to excavate dinosaurs in both
countries, and for exploration and training of paleontologists.  This lasts until 1990.

The first symposium devoted exclusively to dinosaur systematics is held at the Tyrrell
Museum of Paleontology in Alberta.  The results are published in a
symposium volume in 1990.

Paul Sereno publishes his landmark paper re-classifying the Ornithischia using cladistics.

Jacques A. Gauthier publishes his classic paper on the reclassification of the Saurischia
using cladistics.

Paleontologists from the Instituto Antarctic Argentino find the first-known dinosaur in
Antarctica.  It is an ankylosaur.

1987
"Dinosaurs Past and Present" is the first international Art Show to tour the world with the
best art on dinosaurs from all the world's leading artists.

1988
Paul Sereno discovers the complete skull and skeleton of Herrerasaurus.

1989
The Department of Paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley merges with the
Biology Department to become the Department of Integrative Biology.

1992
Paul Sereno and Ricardo Martinez find the earliest-known theropod, Eoraptor.

Bryan Small discovers the most complete skeleton ever found of Stegosaurus at Garden Park,
Colorado.

1993
Utahraptor, a sickle-claw theropod twice the size of Deinonychus, is named.