Walter W. Granger

Excavation of the American Museum of Natural History in Bone Cabin Quarry, Wyoming, Granger seated left next to Henry Fairfield Osborn in the center

Walter Willis Granger (born November 7, 1872 in Middletown Springs , Vermont , † September 6, 1941 in Lusk , Wyoming ) was an American fossil collector and vertebrate paleontologist .

Granger was one of five children of an insurance agent. He became interested in the stuffing of animals at an early age and worked for the American Museum of Natural History at the age of 17 through a friend of his father's . He took part in the museum's fossil searches in the Midwest in 1894/95 and switched to the vertebrate paleontology department (under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn ). In 1897 he discovered the rich fossil site Bone Cabin Quarry near Laramie in Wyoming, where, among other things, an Apatosaurus ( Brontosaurus ) was found for the museum alongside other Jurassic dinosaurs such as Stegosaurus and Allosaurus . In 1907, on behalf of the museum, he took part in the first large American fossil expedition outside North America in Egypt , where tertiary mammals were excavated in Fayum . He became the museum's associate curator .

In 1921 he was deputy director and chief paleontologist of an expedition of the museum to Mongolia and China. He was also involved in the excavations in Zhoukoudian under Johan Gunnar Andersson , which led to the discovery of the Peking man . In 1922, 1923, 1925, 1927 and 1928 he was involved in the expeditions of Roy Chapman Andrews to the Gobi Desert , where he found fossils of Velociraptor , Oviraptor and Protoceratops , among others . He became curator of fossil mammals in the museum in 1927 and also curator of paleontology in the Asia department. He died of heart failure on an expedition in Lusk, Wyoming.

In 1935 he became president of the Explorers Club . In 1932 he received an honorary doctorate from Middlebury College in Vermont.

literature

• Vincent L. Morgan, Spencer G. Lucas: Walter Granger, 1872-1941, Paleontologist (= New Mexico of Natural History and Science. Bulletin. 19, ISSN  1524-4156 ). New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Albuquerque NM 2002, digitized .

Individual evidence

1. ^ The Granger Papers Project.