Rocky Road: Barnum Brown

Barnum Brown

From Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston

Encouraged by his older siblings, Barnum Brown's parents named their youngest child after the illustrious P.T. Barnum, to spruce up the youngster's ordinary surname. The decision proved prophetic. Brown enjoyed a spectacularly successful 66-year career in paleontology, including his post as curator for the American Museum of Natural History, where he was largely responsible for the museum's multi-ton collection of dinosaur fossils.

Brown came from a hard-working farming family that eventually found prosperity — an experience echoed in his own career. In 1894, he began hunting fossils under the direction of paleontologist Samuel Wendell Williston. The following year, he worked with Williston again, to retrieve a Triceratops skull from Wyoming. Williston wrote of Brown:

Brown has been with me on two expeditions, and is the best man in the field that I ever had. He is very energetic, has great powers of endurance, walking thirty miles a day without fatigue, is very methodical in all his habits, and thoroughly honest. He has good ability as a student also and has been a student with me in anatomy, geology and paleontology. He practically relieved me of all care in my last expedition.

In 1897, Brown began working at the American Museum of Natural History. The same year, he explored Upper Jurassic beds in Wyoming. At first, the quarry looked empty, but he kept looking. The quarry that initially seemed useless eventually yielded 65 tons of fossils. About the same time, Brown and his colleague Henry Fairfield Osborn asked a Wyoming shepherd if he knew of any fossils in the area. He didn't. Then they realized his stone cabin was made of fossils. The whole cabin.

To dinosaur lovers, Brown's greatest achievement was likely his discovery of Tyrannosaurus rex, "King of the tyrant lizards" in Hell Creek, Montana. He discovered the first skeleton in 1902, and found a better-preserved skeleton in 1908. Both skeletons were put on display in the American Museum. During World War II, Americans feared that the Germans might bomb New York and the T. rex fossil might be lost (not a misplaced fear — many fossils in European museums were blown to bits in the 1940s). The skeleton Brown discovered in 1902 was shipped to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh.

Perhaps the dinosaur paleontologist with the most field experience of all time, Brown worked not only throughout the United States, but also Canada, South America, India and Ethiopia. To fund expensive digs, he eventually made a deal with the Sinclair Oil Company: He wrote dinosaur booklets for them and they paid for his expeditions. So the gas stations with the Diplodocus logo attracted even more customers by giving them the booklets in the 1930s and 1940s. Brown's collaboration with the oil company also resulted in impressive dinosaur exhibits in the Chicago World's Fair in the 1930s and the New York World's Fair in the 1960s.

Before his career was over, Brown managed to make a remarkable contribution to the field of anthropology. In 1927, he confirmed the identification, by Jesse Dade Figgins, of a prehistoric spear point in Folsom, New Mexico. The Folsom point provided evidence that humans were in North America at the end of the Pleistocene Ice Age, and they were hunting big game.

As well as an adept fossil hunter, Brown was a celebrity known for his charming quirks. An excellent ballroom dancer, he was always in demand with the ladies. (His second wife authored two novels based on his paleontological adventures.) Despite the hardships of field work, Brown often showed up in the quarry dressed in a snappy hat and a full-length fur coat. Yet he kept a somber demeanor of a minister. After he retired from the American Museum of Natural History, he continued to lead tours there, often describing the dinosaur fossils he had collected as his "children." He died just a week shy of his 90th birthday.

For more information:
Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston
A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer Wyoming edited by Kohl, Martin and Brinkman
The Reign of the Dinosaurs by Jean-Guy Michard
Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos
The Dinosaur Papers edited by Weishampel and White
Cruisin' the Fossil Freeway by Johnson and Troll
Starring T. Rex! by José Luis Sanz