Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered T. rex

 

Like Carl Akeley and Roy Chapman Andrews, his colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History, Brown was a real life combination of Indiana Jones and Sherlock Holmes.  He had a sixth sense when it came to discovering dinosaur fossils, and was said to have smelled a fossil prior to sighting any evidence of ancient remains.  He was a man who followed his nose wherever it led him, whether it was the badlands of Canada or the Far East.

Without Brown’s enthusiasm and street-sense, the awesome dinosaurs we take for granted when visiting natural history museums may never have come to be.

Named Barnum, after the co-founder of Barnum and Bailey’s Circus, Brown was a master at mingling scientific adventure with showmanship.  And like his namesake, he was a wheeler-dealer of a businessman and an all around likable chap.  To fund his expensive digs, Brown approached the Sinclair Oil Company and offered to write dinosaur booklets for them to help their sales of “fossil fuel.”  The Sinclair gas stations incorporated a dinosaur for their logo and handed out the booklets that Brown wrote to attract customers.  The oil company was so thrilled with the amount of customers that the logo and dinosaur booklets brought them that they gave Brown enough money to pay for international expeditions and digs at sites all over the world.

Brown was known as an eccentric along with being quite a celebrity.  Although he was a brilliant paleontologist, he never fit the image of the stereotypical absent-minded scientist.   In fact, he was a bit of a dandy and often arrived at the site of a dig dressed for a night on the town and wearing a full length fur coat as you can see in the photo on the right of Brown in the Montana badlands.  Sometimes he even wore a top hat. He also loved ballroom dancing and charmed the ladies of his time.

But his claim to fame was bone hunting, so much so that his was sometimes referred to by his peers and fans as Mr. Bones or Mr. Dinosaur.

Born in 1873, Brown began his career in 1897 at the American Museum of Natural History, where he worked as the assistant of Henry Osborne, the museum’s director.  At that time, the museum didn’t have a single dinosaur for its public to view.  Luckily for us, Brown set his mind and heart to the task of filling its rooms with fossils and bones he collected during the sixty-six years he worked there.  By the end of Brown’s successful career as the chief curator of the museum, he had established the largest dinosaur collection in the world and left a legacy that dino lovers everywhere continue to enjoy

In the early 1900s, he discovered the Tyrannosaurus rex in Hell Creek, Montana.  By 1908, he and his assistants had succeeded in finding almost a complete specimen of the T. rex.  This was quite a hit with the public.  Before T. rex, giant carnivorous dinosaurs were more a part of science fiction than science fact.  The public was shocked to know that actual monsters had once roamed the earth!   Since Brown’s first finding, over thirty specimens of T. Rex have been found.

Brown didn’t stop with T. Rex.  He went on to seek dinosaur and mammal fossils in such remote places as the Red Deer River badlands of Alberta.

Never much of a note-taker, Brown described the badlands by the shapes of the rocks.  Although he noted that a “pack” of Tyrannosaurus rexes were found in one particular bonebed, he never wrote down the exact location and took the secret to his grave.  Today’s paleontologists are still searching the rugged crags and crevices of Alberta searching for rocks that were only referenced in Brown’s notes by such vague names as the “Widow.”

Armed with ample funding from oil companies, Brown spent his life roaming the globe in search of previously unknown dinosaurs.  He found quite a few!   He often named them according to a part of their anatomy which separated them from their comrades.  Most of the names of the dinosaurs that Barnum Brown found were later changed, probably to the dismay of the eccentric dino hunter.

source: Las Vegas Natural History Museum site