Osborn, Henry Fairfield

OSBORN, HENRY FAIRFIELD

(b. Fairfield, Connecticut, 8 August 1857; d. Garrison, New York, 6 November 1935)

vertebrate paleontology.

Osborn was the eldest son of William Henry Osborn, president of the Illinois Central Railroad, and of Virginia Reed Sturges. He spent his early life in the vicinity of New York City. He attended the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), where he was much influenced by President James McCosh and Arnold Guyot, director of the museum. At Princeton he began a lifelong friendship with William Berryman Scott. In their junior year, Scott and Osborn became intensely interested in the fossil remains of extinct reptiles and mammals. The young men accordingly organized their first paleontological expedition. They spent the summer of 1877 in Colorado and Wyoming, still a wild land inhabited by less than friendly Indians and by some of the “old mountain men.” In 1878 there was a second expedition, and it was at this time that they met and became disciples of Edward Drinker Cope of Philadelphia, the rival of O. C. Marsh of Yale.

After completing their undergraduate work at Princeton, Scott and Osborn went abroad for postgraduate studies. Osborn studied under T. H. Huxley and Francis Maitland Balfour in London. He also met Charles Darwin, an encounter that he never forgot.

He returned to join the faculty at Princeton, and in 1881 married Lucretia Perry; they had five children. In 1891 he was called to Columbia University to found a department of biology and to the American Museum of Natural History to found a department of mammalian paleontology (soon to become the department of vertebrate paleontology). He spent the remainder of his life in New York City, where he was actively associated with Columbia until 1910 and with the American Museum of Natural History until his death.

In addition to his career as first head of the biology department at Columbia, Osborn was first dean of the graduate faculty, and for many years was Da Costa professor of zoology, in which capacity he trained numerous students, many of whom became distinguished zoologists and paleontologists. At the same time he served as head of the department of vertebrate paleontology, where he was instrumental in building a collection of worldwide importance. For twenty-five years he was also president of the American Museum of Natural History and was largely responsible for making it probably the largest natural history museum in the world.

In spite of his involvement with these several concurrent careers, Osborn was primarily a research scientist. He continually studied fossil vertebrates, and with the aid of assistants and colleagues, who did much of the detailed work for him, he published some 600 papers, books, and monographs.

Although Osborn was concerned with the details of vertebrate evolution—particularly that of reptiles and mammals—he was especially interested in the larger problems of life. He was a theorist and proposed various explanations for many aspects of evolution. His important contributions to the knowledge of evolution within many groups of mammals and reptiles were, nonetheless, based upon the fossil evidence. He had a grand concept of the adaptive radiation of life; yet in spite of his penetrating mind, he never seemed to appreciate fully the significance of genetic studies to the modern concept of evolution. Osborn was also a master of synthesis, a capacity illustrated by his enormous monographs on the titanotheres and the proboscideans.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A full bibliography of Osborn’s works (exclusive of newspaper articles, abstracts, and some popular articles) will be found in William K. Gregory, “Biographical Memoir of Henry Fairfield Osborn 1857–1935,” in Biographical Memoirs. National Academy of Sciences, 19 (1938), 53–119. Sec also George Gaylord Simpson, “Henry Fairfield Osborn,” in Dictionary of American Biography, 11 , supp. 1 (New York, 1944), 584–587, which includes a bibliography.

Edwin H. Colbert