page_title: Benjamin Franklin Mudge
section_title: Fossils for Marsh
hierarchical_section_title: Benjamin Franklin Mudge / Biography / Fossils for Marsh
caption_attribution_description: English: Diplodocus carnegiei, the well known sauropod from the Late Jurassic of North America.
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: After his dismissal from KSAC in 1874, Mudge wrote to Marsh:
  When you were here, you stated that you should like to employ one or more young men to collect fossils in western Kansas. As perhaps you may have learned, I have been summarily  discharged (with two other professors) from this college. This has been done by an incompetent, conceited clergyman, who is acting as president.
  — February 3, 1874 letter in the Yale Archives
  Marsh hired Mudge to lead fossil hunting expeditions. He was assisted on his 1874 expedition by Samuel Wendell Williston, who started leading his own expeditions in 1877. Mudge primarily focused on the Kansas Chalk from 1874 to 1876, but from 1876 to 1879 he expanded into Colorado discovering some of the first Jurassic dinosaurs in the American West. According to Blackmar, "in one year he shipped over three tons of fossils, etc., to New Haven" 
  Marsh's rival Cope in turn had Oramel Lucas and Charles Hazelius Sternberg seeking out new finds. In 1877, Cope's team was making remarkable finds at Como Bluff, Wyoming near Cañon City, Colorado, and Marsh sent Mudge to establish a quarry near the location. While the quarry was eventually abandoned because the bones were too fragile to transport, Mudge and Williston discovered the holotype specimens of Allosaurus (A. fragilis) and Diplodocus (D. longus) in 1877 before the quarry was closed, and both species were named by Marsh, the former in 1877 and the latter in 1878.
caption: A modern depiction of Diplodocus
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