Elmer S. Riggs

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Riggs and HW Menke with Brachiosaurus altithorax bones in Chicago, before 1903
Elmer Riggs during the excavation of a megatherium in a plaster coat on the banks of the Rio Quequeri, Salada, in the province of Buenos Aires, around 1927.

Elmer Samuel Riggs (born January 23, 1869 in Trafalgar , Indiana , † March 25, 1963 in Sedan , Kansas ) was an American paleontologist .

Life

Riggs grew up in Kansas and studied at the University of Kansas . Then he was at the American Museum of Natural History and from 1898 at the Field Museum of Natural History (then Field Columbian Museum) in Chicago . He began excavations for the museum in the Morrison Formation in Wyoming and Colorado and excavated the first known skeleton of Brachiosaurus altithorax near Fruita in Colorado in 1900 and a year later in 1901 a skeleton of the Apatosaurus , which also later became one of the attractions of the field Museum belonged. He became a curator at the Field Museum, where he retired in 1942 but continued to conduct tours well into retirement.

He was the first descriptor of Brachiosaurus and found evidence that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus represent the same genus, which later prevailed. He also took the view early on that the large sauropods were land-dwellers and did not live in lakes or rivers, as was often assumed until the 1970s, when Robert Bakker and others reiterated the view that they were land-dwellers.

He later studied fossil mammals, which he excavated in the United States and South America until the early 1930s. He described, among other things, the predatory Thylacosmilus from the Pliocene of Argentina, which is one of the marsupials and is equipped with saber teeth .

He was an honorary member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology since 1952 .

literature

  • John Foster Jurassic West: The Dinosaurs of the Morrison Formation and Their World , Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007
  • Clifford C. Gregg Memorial to Elmer S. Riggs (1869-1963) , Geological Society of America Bulletin, Vol. 75, 1964, pp. 129-132

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Riggs Structure and relationships of opisthocoelian dinosaurs, part I: Apatosaurus Marsh , Field Columbian Museum Publications, Geological Series 2 (4), 1903, pp. 165-196
  2. ↑ Riggs Brachiosaurus altithorax, the largest known dinosaur , American Journal of Science, Series 4, Volume 15, 1903, pp. 299-306. Riggs Structure and relationships of opisthocoelian dinosaurs, part II: the Brachiosauridae , Field Columbian Museum Publications, Geological Series 2 (6), 1904, pp. 229-247
  3. ↑ Bakker Ecology of the Brontosaurs , Nature, Volume 229, 1971, pp. 172-174
  4. ↑ Riggs Preliminary description of a new marsupial saber-tooth from the Pliocene of Argentina , Field Museum of Natural History Publications, Geological Series, Volume 6, 1933, pp. 61-66, Internet Archive
personal data
SURNAME Riggs, Elmer S.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Riggs, Elmer Samuel (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 23, 1869
PLACE OF BIRTH Trafalgar, Indiana
DATE OF DEATH March 25, 1963
Place of death Sedan (Kansas)