Charles H. Sternberg

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Charles Hazelius Sternberg (born June 15, 1850 near Cooperstown , New York ; † July 20, 1943 ) was one of the most successful American fossil collectors of the 19th and early 20th centuries (dinosaurs, tertiary mammals).

Charles Hazelius Sternberg (1909)

Life

Sternberg grew up in Cooperstown. His father Levi Sternberg was a pastor at Hartwick Seminary. He worked from 1867 with his twin brother on the ranch of his older brother George M. Sternberg (1838-1915), a military surgeon with the rank of brigadier general and bacteriologist (who also collected fossils), in Ellsworth County in Kansas and collected fossils in the near Cretaceous Dakota sandstone formations. He sent plant fossils to the Smithsonian in Washington and came into contact with the paleobotanist Leo Lesquereux , who collected in his neighborhood in 1872 and named a plant ( Protophyllum sternbergii ) after him. In 1875/76 he studied briefly at the Kansas State Agricultural College , the forerunner of the University of Kansas , but did not graduate. From 1876 he began collecting fossils full-time for the famous paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope in Wyoming , Texas , Montana , Oregon and Washington , among others , both dinosaurs and mammals of the tertiary era . Cope named a fossil camel after Sternberg ( Paratylopus sternbergi ). He also collected on his own account for Cope's competitor Marsh and for other museums such as the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Harvard from 1882 in the Permian of Texas (where he discovered fossils of Dimetrodon and Eryops ). In 1912 he moved with his sons Charles M. Sternberg , George F. Sternberg (1883-1969) and Levi Sternberg (1894-1976), all of whom were well-known dinosaur excavators, to Canada, where he opened up the rich dinosaur sites in Alberta . He was a co-founder of the Calgary Zoo , known for dinosaur exhibits.

He found, among others, in 1908 with his sons in Lusk , Wyoming, a (then so called) Trachodon ( Edmontosaurus annectens ) skeleton are skin parts ( trachodon mummy , Trachodon mummy ), now in the American Museum of Natural History (thanks to Henry Fairfield Osborn , the it described in 1912).

Mummified trachodon found by the Sternbergs in 1908

Osborn named Pentaceratops sternbergii after Sternberg.

He had been married to Anna Reynolds since 1880 and had three sons. Two of the sons stayed in Canada (Charles M. Sternberg at the National Museum in Ottawa and Levi at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto), George F. Sternberg returned to Kansas and was a curator at the Fort Hays State University Museum (FHSU) from 1933 to 1955 (today's Sternberg Museum of Natural History). Among other things, he found a known fossil of a fish with another fish in the digestive system ( Xiphactinus with Gillicus arcuatus in the abdomen).

Charles H. Sternberg was deeply religious and wrote and published poetry.

Publications

literature

  • Katherine Rodgers A dinosaur dynasty: The Sternberg Fossil Hunters , Mountain Press Publishing Company, 1991
  • Charles H. Sternberg A story of the past: or the romance of science , Sherman, French & Co., Boston 1917 (collection of poems)

Web links

Remarks

  1. First he turned to the fossil collectors of his great competitor Othniel Charles Marsh , but was not accepted.
  2. The term is no longer used today and is a noun dubium .