From The Life of a Fossil Hunter by Charles Sternberg
From The Life of a Fossil Hunter by Charles Sternberg |
The son of a minister, Charles Sternberg looked for God's handiwork in nature, and finished his long career satisfied that he had found what he was looking for. When the young Sternberg's family moved from upstate New York to the Kansas frontier in the 1860s, he found himself surrounded by the Cretaceous Dakota sandstone, rich with fossils. Sternberg not only did well in rich fossil country, he also had a knack for finding fossils in areas that had already been combed by earlier fossil hunters.
Young Sternberg hoped to prospect for O.C. Marsh, but when that attempt failed, he turned to E.D. Cope. Cope funded Sternberg's first professional expedition, beginning a long and fruitful collaboration. In subsequent years, Sternberg would marvel at Cope's energetic and sometimes reckless behavior and eventually describe their adventures in The Life of a Fossil Hunter. Sternberg would also strike out on his own, collecting for the American Museum of Natural History and the British Museum, among others.
Cope collected all kinds of fossils from the Paleozoic through the Cenozoic, but he is probably best known for the dinosaur fossils he found. He raised three sons: George, Charlie and Levi, who all became talented fossil collectors in their own right. The crowning achievement of Sternberg's career came in 1908, when his son George found a duckbill dinosaur mummy, with much of the skin intact. Originally reserved for the British museum, the fossil ended up in the American Museum of Natural History. The Sternbergs again found duckbill dinosaurs with skin impressions some years later, but the fossils were lost in transit to England when a World War I German warship fired on the vessel carrying them.
For more information:
The Life of a Fossil Hunter by Charles Sternberg
Dinosaurs in the Attic by Douglas J. Preston
Hunting Dinosaurs by Louie Psihoyos
Narrative text and graphic design © by Michon Scott - Updated August 21, 2005