page_title: Benjamin Franklin Mudge
section_title: First discoveries
hierarchical_section_title: Benjamin Franklin Mudge / Biography / First discoveries
caption_attribution_description: Ichthyornis dispar, a bird from the Late Cretaceous of North America, pencil drawing, digital coloring
context_page_description: Benjamin Franklin Mudge was an American lawyer, geologist and teacher. Briefly the mayor of Lynn, Massachusetts, he later moved to Kansas where he was appointed the first State Geologist. He led the first geological survey of the state in 1864, and published the first book on the geology of Kansas. He lectured extensively, and was department chair at the Kansas State Agricultural College.
  He also avidly collected fossils, and was one of the first to systematically explore the Permian and Mesozoic biota in the geologic formations of Kansas and the American West, including the Niobrara Chalk, the Morrison Formation, and the Dakota Sandstone. While not formally trained in paleontology, he kept extensive and accurate field notes and sent most of his fossils East to be described by some of the most noted paleontologists of his time, including the rivals Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope.
  His discoveries included at least 80 new species of extinct animals and plants, and are found in the collections of some of the most prestigious U.S. institutions of natural history, including the Smithsonian and Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History.
context_section_description: Mudge began geological and paleontological field expeditions in 1865, while still employed at KSAC. He collected footprints near Junction City in 1865, and invertebrates and Late Cretaceous deciduous leaves near Ellsworth in 1866, and more plants and a saurian in 1869 from the Republican River near the northern state line. His expedition in 1870 was near Fort Wallace and saw the discovery of numerous plesiosaurs and fish from the Saurodontidae family. 1871 saw plants, molluscs, vertebrates, and the bird Hesperornis from western Kansas. In 1872 more vertebrates and plants were discovered in Smith County, while in 1873 new species were discovered in Trego and Ellis Counties, and plesiosaurs were found in 1874 in Jewell and Gove Counties.
  While he maintained a small collection as KSAC, the majority of his finds were sent to Eastern paleontologists to be described. He initially corresponded in this fashion with Fielding Bradford Meek at the Smithsonian (primarily concerning molluscs), Leo Lesquereux (plants), Edward Drinker Cope at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia (vertebrates), Othniel Charles Marsh at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, Louis Agassiz at Harvard, and James Dwight Dana at Yale. In turn, Cope visited Mudge in 1871, and Cope, Marsh, and Lesquerenx all visited in 1872. Cope and Lesquerenx published most of Mudge's discoveries from this period.
  Mudge discovered Ichthyornis in 1872. While he initially planned to ship the specimen to Cope, he heard of Othniel Charles Marsh's interest and sent it instead to his former acquaintance from Connecticut. Marsh first described the bird in 1872, but misidentified the toothed jaw as belonging to a type of lizard. Marsh associated the jaw with the avian postcranial elements and published the new data the next year. An analysis in 1952 concluded the jaw actually belonged to a mosasaur, but a reevaluation in 1967 and new specimens confirmed Marsh's assessment.
  This was the first bird described with teeth; Richard Owen's original description of the London Specimen of Archaeopteryx in 1861 did not recognize its associated teeth, and assumed the bird had a beak. This was also the start of Mudge's association with Marsh, as the rivalry between Cope and Marsh (known as the "Bone Wars") heated up.
caption: Ichthyornis was probably more gracile than this reconstruction[19]
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