page_title: History of paleontology in the United States
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: History of paleontology in the United States / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: Visit my blog at ideonexus.com for science news and speculation.
context_page_description: The history of paleontology in the United States refers to the developments and discoveries regarding fossils found within or by people from the United States of America. Local paleontology began informally with Native Americans, who have been familiar with fossils for thousands of years. They both told myths about them and applied them to practical purposes. African slaves also contributed their knowledge; the first reasonably accurate recorded identification of vertebrate fossils in the new world was made by slaves on a South Carolina plantation who recognized the elephant affinities of mammoth molars uncovered there in 1725. The first major fossil discovery to attract the attention of formally trained scientists were the Ice Age fossils of Kentucky's Big Bone Lick. These fossils were studied by eminent intellectuals like France's George Cuvier and local statesmen and frontiersman like Daniel Boone, Benjamin Franklin, William Henry Harrison, Thomas Jefferson, and George Washington. By the end of the 18th century possible dinosaur fossils had already been found.
  By the beginning of the 19th, their fossil footprints definitely had.
context_section_description: Between 1906 and 1916 hundreds of thousands of Pleistocene fossils were uncovered in central Los Angeles. Just a few years after the La Brea tar pits were found, in 1908, paleontologist Earl Douglass was excavating fossils in Utah on behalf of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. The director of the museum visited Douglass's camp that year and suggested that Douglass search for Jurassic dinosaur fossils in the Uinta Mountains north of his camp. Douglass agreed and they set off to the Uinta Mountains the next day. They found so many fossils that Douglas built a home near the Green River and his family moved in from Pittsburgh. He spent the rest of his career in the area excavating fossils. Among the local finds were Allosaurus, Apatosaurus, Barosaurus, Camarasaurus, Camptosaurus, Diplodocus, Dryosaurus, Stegosaurus. In 1915 US president Woodrow Wilson declared the quarry and surrounding land Dinosaur National Monument in order to protect it from settlement. Between 1909 and 1923 millions of tons of rocks and fossils had been excavated from the Dinosaur National Monument area.
  In 1909 in paleontology Massachusetts paleontologist Mignon Talbot became the first woman elected to the Paleontological Society. In an unrelated east coast discovery of 1912, workers digging in a cave for a railroad construction project near Cumberland, Maryland in Allegany County uncovered many fossils in the course of their labor. However, eventually the scientific significance of the fossils was realized and paleontologist J. W. Gidley conducted fieldwork at the cave between 1912 and 1915. By 1938 report more than 50 different kinds of animals had been identified among the fossils.
  In 1938, Barnum Brown of the American Museum of Natural History sent Roland T. Bird to Texas in search of dinosaur trackways reportedly uncovered by local moonshiners. At the town of Glen Rose local residents guided him to carnivorous dinosaur tracks preserved along the Paluxy River. While he was cleaning mud from these footprints, he noticed another kind of footprint, apparently left by a long-necked sauropod dinosaur. In 1940, Bird resumed his Texas fieldwork with the help of paleontologists from the Survey and labor employed by the Works Progress Administration.
  Later, in 1940, the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology collaborated with National Geographic on an expedition into the badlands of South Dakota. They uncovered tons of fossils from at least 175 different species of Oligocene life. The fossils were taken to the South Dakota School of Mines in Rapid City. Among the mammal discoveries were the remains of rhinoceroses, tapirs, three-toed horses, pig-like animals, and rodents. In 1947 another major dinosaur discovery took place. An American Museum field party led by Edwin Harris Colbert found a bonebed including the skeletons of more than 1,000 Coelophysis at Ghost Ranch. Later, in 1953 University of New Mexico graduate student William Chenoweth found three important sites where dinosaurs were preserved in Morrison Formation rocks. He found a fragmentary Allosaurus, sauropods, and Stegosaurus.
  The famous Montanan Tertiary deposits of the Ruby Valley basin were also first studied in 1947. The early research was performed by Dr. Herman F. Becker on behalf of the New York Botanical Garden. These deposits from the southwestern part of the state are one of the best sources of plant and insect fossils in North America. In 1959 Becker's Ruby Valley excavations uncovered about 5,000 specimens of more than two hundred species of plants, insects, and fishes. Invertebrate finds included ants, bees, beetles, earwigs, caddis flies, crane flies, damsel flies, lantern flies, may flies, grasshoppers, leaf hoppers, mosquitoes, snails, and wasps. Vertebrate remains included feathers, and, once in a while, a bird.
  During the late 1950s Francis Tully found a fossil he could not identify at the strip mines near Braidwood, Illinois. He took the specimen to Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History. Researchers at the museum couldn't identify it either, and the specimen bec
caption: Barosaurus and Allosaurus mounted at the American Museum of Natural History.
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