1880–1900
The next decade, that of 1880–1890, saw a number of notable additions to the workers in vertebrate paleontology: Henry F. Osborn, W. B. Scott, R. W. Shufeldt, J. L. Wortman, George Baur, F. A. Lucas, and F. W. True. Shufeldt is our highest authority on the osteology of birds, both recent and extinct, having recently described all of the extinct forms contained in the Marsh collection; True wrote of Cetacea; Lucas of marine and Pleistocene mammals and birds, and has also written popular books on prehistoric life. Lucas’s greatest service, however, lies in the museums, where he has manifested a genius second to none in the installation of mute evidences of living and past organisms. Wortman was for a time associated with Cope, later with Osborn in the American Museum, again at the Carnegie Museum at Pittsburgh, and finally at Yale in research on the Bridger Eocene portion of the Marsh collection. His work has been chiefly the perfection of field methods in vertebrate paleontology, and as a special investigator of Tertiary Mammalia, treating the latter largely from the morphologic and taxonomic standpoints. Wortman’s Yale results on the carnivores and primates of the Eocene, as yet unfinished, were published in the Journal in 1901–1904.
William B. Scott is a graduate of Princeton, and has spent thirty-four years in her service as Blair Professor of Geology and Paleontology. His first publication, in 1878, issued in conjunction with Osborn and Speir, described material collected by them in the Eocene formations of the West, and since that time Scott’s research has been entirely with the mammals, on which he is one of our highest authorities. His most notable works have been a History of Land Mammals of the Western Hemisphere, 1913, and the results of the Patagonian expeditions by Hatcher, which are published in a quarto series in conjunction with W. J. Sinclair, although they are the authors of separate volumes, Scott’s work being mainly on the carnivores and edentates of the Santa Cruz formation. It is as a systematist in research and as an educator that Scott has attained his highest usefulness.
The man who, next to the three pioneers, has attained the highest reputation in vertebrate paleontologic research, is Henry Fairfield Osborn. Graduate of Princeton in the same class that produced Scott, Osborn served for a time as professor of comparative anatomy in that institution, and in 1891 was called to New York to organize the department of zoology in Columbia University and that of vertebrate paleontology in the American Museum of Natural History. He had, early in his career, gone west in company with Professor Scott, and had collected material from the Eocene formation of Wyoming, upon which they based their first joint paper in 1878, Osborn’s first independent production, a memoir on two genera of Dinocerata, appearing in 1881. A number of papers followed, on the Mesozoic Mammalia, on Cope’s tritubercular theory, and on certain apparent evidences for the transmission of acquired characters. It was, however, with his acceptance of the New York responsibilities, especially at the American Museum, that Osborn’s most significant work began. Aided first by Wortman and Earle, later by W. D. Matthew and others, he has built up the greatest and most complete collection of fossil vertebrates extant; its value, however, was largely enhanced through the purchase of the private collection of Professor Cope, which of course included a large number of types. The American Museum collection thus contains not only a vast series of representative specimens from every class and order of vertebrates, secured by purchase or expedition from nearly all the great localities of the world, but an exhibition series of skulls and partial and entire skeletons and restorations which no other institution can hope to equal. Based upon this wonderful material is a large amount of research, filling many volumes, published for the greater part in the bulletin and memoirs of the Museum. This research is not only the product of the staff, including Walter Granger, Barnum Brown, W. D. Matthew, and W. K. Gregory, but also of a number of other American and some foreign paleontologists as well.
Professor Osborn’s own work has been voluminous, his bibliography from 1877 to 1916 containing no fewer than 441 titles, ranging over the fields of paleontology,—which of course includes the greater number—geology, correlation and paleogeography, evolutionary principles exemplified in the Mammalia, man, neurology and embryology, biographies, and the theory of education.
In paleontology, Osborn’s researches have been largely with the Reptilia and Mammalia, partly morphological, but also taxonomic and evolutional. Faunistic studies have also been made of the mammals. Of his published volumes the most important are, first, the Age of Mammals (1910), in which he treats not of evolutionary series of phylogenies, but of faunas and their origin, migrations, and extinctions, and of the correlation of Old and New World Tertiary deposits and their contents. Men of the Old Stone Age (1916) is an exhaustive treatise and is the first full and authoritative American presentation of what has been discovered up to the present time throughout the world in regard to human prehistory. In his latest volume, The Origin and Evolution of Life (1917), Osborn presents a new energy conception of evolution and heredity as against the prevailing matter and form conceptions. In this volume there is summed up the whole story of the origin and evolution of life on earth up to the appearance of man. This last book is novel in its conceptions, but it is too early as yet to judge of the acceptance of Osborn’s theses by his fellow workers in science.
Since the death of Professor Marsh, Osborn has served as vertebrate paleontologist to the United States Geological Survey, and has in charge the carrying through to completion of the many monographs proposed by his distinguished predecessor. One of these, that on the horned dinosaurs, has been completed by Hatcher and Lull (1907), another on the stegosaurian dinosaurs has been carried forward by C. W. Gilmore of the United States National Museum, while under Osborn’s own hand are the memoirs on the titanotheres (aided by W. K. Gregory), the horses, and the sauropod dinosaurs. Of these, the first, when it shall have been completed, promises to be the most monumental and exhaustive study of a group of fossil organisms ever undertaken.
As a leader in science, a teacher and administrator, Professor Osborn’s rank is high among the leading vertebratists. He is remarkably successful in his choice of assistants and in stimulating them in their productiveness so that their combined results form a very considerable share of the later literature in America.
The ninth decade ushered in the work of a valuable group of students, of whom John Bell Hatcher should be mentioned in particular, as his work is done. Graduate of Yale in 1884, he spent a number of years assisting his teacher, Professor Marsh, mainly in the field, collecting during that time, either for Yale or for the United States Geological Survey, an enormous amount of very fine material, especially from the West, although he also collected in the older Tertiary and Potomac beds near Washington. In the West he secured no fewer than 105 titanothere skulls, explored the Tertiary, Judith River, and Lance formations, collected and in fact virtually discovered the remains of the Cretaceous mammals and of the horned dinosaurs which he was later privileged to describe. He then (1893) went to Princeton, which he served for seven years, his principal work being explorations in Patagonia for the E. and M. Museum, one direct result of which was the publication of a large quarto on the narrative of the expedition and the geography and ethnography of the region. Going to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh in 1900, Hatcher carried forward the work of exploration and collecting begun for that institution by Wortman, and as a partial result prepared many papers, the principal ones being memoirs on the dinosaurs Haplocanthosaurus and Diplodocus. In 1903, with T. W. Stanton of the United States Geological Survey, Hatcher explored the Judith River beds and together they settled the vexatious problem of their age, the published results appearing in 1905, after Hatcher’s death. His last piece of research, begun in 1902 and continued until his death in 1904, was an elaborate monograph on the Ceratopsia, one of the many projected by Marsh. Of this memoir Hatcher had completed some 150 printed quarto pages, giving a rare insight into the anatomy of these strange forms. The final chapters, however, which were based very largely upon Hatcher’s own opinions, had to be prepared by another hand.
Despite his early death, therefore, Hatcher rendered a very signal service to American paleontology—in exploration, stratigraphy, morphology, and systematic revision—and his activity in planning new fields of research, such, for instance, as the exploration of the Antarctic continent, gave promise of further high attainment, when his hand was arrested by death.