Barnum Brown

Barnum Brown (born February 12, 1873 in Carbondale, Kansas , † February 5, 1963 in New York , NY ) was an American paleontologist . He is considered one of the most famous " dinosaur hunters " of the 20th century . He found the first documented fossil of the Tyrannosaurus rex and excavated in the American West on behalf of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).

Brown working in the fields in Montana, 1914

Life

Brown was named after the circus entrepreneur PT Barnum . He began studying at the University of Kansas in 1890 , but dropped out before completing his doctorate to collect fossils and trade them. In 1894 he began excavating fossils under the direction of paleontologist Samuel Wendell Williston and was involved in the recovery of a Triceratops skull. He collected for the AMNH in the late 1890s in Wyoming (near Howe Ranch) and then in the Hell Creek Formation in Montana , where he excavated for around 10 years. The site was extremely productive and he and his team used dynamite to retrieve the fossils, as was still common at the time. Then he went to Alberta in Canada and the site on the Red Deer River near Drumheller , which his team traveled on a raft. They dug there in competition with Charles Hazelius Sternberg and his sons.

Brown (right) with Henry Fairfield Osborn (left) on the AMNH's Mary Jane raft in 1911

From 1897 to 1942 he was deputy director of the American Museum of Natural History, where under Henry Fairfield Osborn he was responsible for the museum's famous collection of dinosaur skeletons, which he co-founded around 1910. He was later on the road as an excavator abroad, where he also worked for the US secret services during the two world wars and occasionally for oil companies.

Brown discovered at least eight previously unknown species of dinosaur, and his work made an important contribution to the image of the dinosaurs that populated North America in the Late Cretaceous Period . He discovered his most important find in 1902 in Hell Creek in the northwest of the USA. This fossil was far from complete with around 70 bones, but was given the name Tyrannosaurus rex - King of the tyrannical lizards. According to the idea of ​​the time, the T-Rex was shown standing upright, which could be revised by more recent findings and comparisons in nature (e.g. with birds). Purely by appearance, the foundation was laid for the setting that the T-Rex was a hunter.

In 1952 he became an honorary member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology .

He was married twice. His second wife Lilian Brown accompanied him on expeditions and wrote a memory book.

literature

• Roland TV Bird and Theodore Schreiber: Bones for Barnum Brown: Adventures of a Dinosaur Hunter . ISBN 0-87565-011-2
• Lilian Brown: Married to Dinosaurs , Vienna: Ullstein, 1951
• Lilian Brown: I married a dinosaur , London [u. a.]: Harrap, 1951
• Lowell Dingus and Mark A. Norell: Barnum Brown: the man who discovered Tyrannosaurus rex , Berkeley [u. a.]: University of California Press, c2010, ISBN 978-0-520-25264-6

Web links

Commons : Barnum Brown  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Barnum Brown 1909 The American Museum Of Natural History