dinosaur hunters

dinosaur hunters In the early nineteenth century William Buckland of Oxford coined the name Megalosaurus for a large Jurassic fossil carnivore. Soon afterwards a Sussex family doctor, Gideon Mantell, discovered and named Iguanodon. Like Buckland, he thought he had a giant lizard to deal with. By 1841 enough Mesozoic bones and teeth had been collected for Richard Owen, a young anatomist, to use the term ‘Dinosauria’ for these ancient reptiles.

By the middle of the nineteenth century Mesozoic bones and teeth were known from many parts of Europe and from a few localities in eastern North America. Then from the American west came reports of huge bones that drew the attention of two very energetic zoologists in the east, Othniel Charles Marsh (1831–99) and Edward Drinker Cope (1840–97). In competition, they set out to collect for their institutions as many of the new spectacular fossils as they could. Their teams shipped back east many hundreds of tons of material excavated in Colorado, Montana, Wyoming, and Utah. Their rivalry reached positively dangerous levels, but the fossils were becoming famous. Marsh, a professor at Yale with a private fortune behind him, collected for the Peabody Museum at Yale. Marsh was eventually appointed palaeontologist to the new US Geological Survey in 1881. His rival Cope, from Philadelphia, was an adventurous biologist intent upon the natural history of the west. He was also editor of the American Naturalist and himself published over 1200 books and papers.

Marsh and Cope were followed by others who had been their students and assistants and who were to make additional discoveries. Henry Fairfield Osborne (b. 1857) and William Berryman Scott were disciples of Cope. Others were W. D. Matthew and Barnum Brown, Earl Douglass and Charles W. Gilmour, all of whom continued excavating in the west and adding new giants to the collections.

The first Canadian dinosaurs were found in Saskatchewan by G. M. Dawson of the Geological Survey of Canada, and in 1883 his assistant J. B. Tyrrell found bones in the Red Deer River valley in Alberta. Another member of the Canadian Survey, Lawrence M. Lamb, reached Alberta in 1897. His discoveries initiated the Red Deer River dinosaur rush that lasted until 1917. Here the Sternbergs, father and sons, and Barnum Brown collected great numbers of the latest Cretacous dinosaurs.

Meanwhile in Europe, the German Friedrich von Huene (b. 1875), a renowned traveller and scholar-collector of dinosaurs at the University of Tübingen, made discoveries in many parts of Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. He was still active in his nineties. A rival of von Huene was the Baron Nopsca von Felsö-Szilvás, a Hungarian eccentric genius who committed suicide in 1933. Prior to the First World War, Werner Janensch of the Berlin Museum used large numbers of natives to collect huge dinosaurs in Tanganyika, East Africa.

Important discoveries were made in the Gobi desert of Mongolia by American expeditions in 1922, 1923, and 1925, led by Roy Chapman Andrews. They included eggs and baby dinosaurs. Parties from Soviet Russia, led by I. Efremov, visited Mongolia in 1946–49. They collected giant carnivore and gigantic duck-billed dinosaur remains. Communist China has been active in dinosaur research, and numbers of Middle Jurassic giants have been found in Chengde and other areas.

D. L. Dineley

Bibliography

Colbert, E. H. (1968) Men and dinosaurs, the search in field and laboratory. Dutton, New York.