page_title: Samuel Wendell Williston
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Samuel Wendell Williston / Early life
caption_attribution_description: Willison in 1891. From Shor, p. 48
context_page_description: Samuel Wendell Williston was an American educator, entomologist, and paleontologist who was the first to propose that birds developed flight cursorially, rather than arboreally. He was a specialist on the flies, Diptera.
  He is remembered for Williston's law, which states that parts in an organism, such as arthropod limbs, become reduced in number and specialized in function through evolutionary history.
context_section_description: Williston was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Samuel Williston and Jane A. Williston née Turner. As a young child, Williston's family travelled to Kansas Territory in 1857 under the auspices of the New England Emigrant Aid Company to help fight the extension of slavery. He was raised in Manhattan, Kansas, attended public high school there, and graduated from Kansas State Agricultural College (now Kansas State University) in 1872, afterwards receiving a Magister Artium from that institution.
  In 1874, he went on his first field fossil hunting expedition for Othniel Charles Marsh at Yale University under the mentorship of Benjamin Franklin Mudge, and led his first expedition in 1877. With Mudge, Williston discovered the first fossils of the dinosaurs Allosaurus and Diplodocus. He was noted for painstakingly illustrating the finds. In 1880, he matriculated to Yale University, for several years was a post-graduate student and faculty member. Around this time, he proposed the first explicit model for the terrestrial origin of bird flight (i.e., that dinosaurs developed flight by running along the ground rather than jumping from trees).
  Williston returned to Kansas in 1890, to take a position on the faculty at the University of Kansas as a professor of geology and anatomy.  In 1899, he was named the first Dean of the new School of Medicine there. He was also a member of the state boards of health and medical examiners. In 1902, Williston left Kansas again, and took the chair of paleontology at the University of Chicago.
  Williston was a fellow of the Geological Society of America and foreign correspondent for the London Geological and Zoölogical societies. He was president of the Kansas Academy of Science, and in 1903 became president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. He was the author of several books, and the Smithsonian Institution now administers an endowment fund in his name.
caption: Williston in 1891
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