Museum celebrates one hundred years of vertebrate fossil collecting

By John D. Chorn and Cathy M. Dwigans, originally published in Panorama 19 (2):4-5. The University of Kansas Natural History Museum. Lawrence, KS. (Fall, 1990).

 

"RED BEDS TO ROCK CHALK: 100 Years of Vertebrate Paleontology at KU" opened on the museum's fifth floor on July 1 and continues through Decem­ber 31. Fossils from the 200-million-year-­old red beds of Texas and Oklahoma and the 90-million-year-old Niobrara Chalk formations of western Kansas are internationally known. KU Museum of Natural History vertebrate paleontology collec­tions, ranked among the ten largest in the United States, include specimens from North and South America, Europe, and Asia.

 

The exhibition shows the workers-students, staff, volunteers, and distin­guished visitors-who helped build museum collections. Techniques of col­lecting and preparing fossil specimens are shown in photographs, some taken in the 1890s, when workers used wagons and teams of horses.

The collection, if not the study, of fossil vertebrates at KU began with Francis Snow. Snow was one of three faculty members when the university opened in 1866 and was KU chancellor from 1890 to 1901. Some of the earliest fossils acquired by the university were collected by Benjamin Mudge, the state's first paleontologist and stratigrapher. Mudge spent most of his career at Kansas State University but briefly held an ap­pointment at KU.

 

Snow sought out new faculty of the highest caliber, including Samuel Willis­ton, hired in 1890 to teach geology and paleontology.

Williston's appointment marked the beginning of a century of commitment to the study of fossil vertebrates at the university. He trained paleontologists and led several expeditions to build up the collections. Williston collected and stud­ied extinct marine reptiles from the Nio­brara Chalk of western Kansas while at KU.

Clarence McClung, a student of Wil­liston's, was curator of fossil vertebrates at KU from 1902 to 1912. McClung contin­ued collecting in the Niobrara Chalk but is best known for his pioneering work in genetics. His studies of sex chromosomes offered the first proof that characters of individuals were carried on specific chro­mosomes. Like Williston, McClung was dean of the University of Kansas School of Medicine.

Handel T. Martin, curator of fossil vertebrates from 1912 to 1931, had little formal education. He settled in Logan County, Kansas, in 1886 and began col­lecting fossils in the Niobrara Chalk in 1887. Martin collected for O. C. Marsh, Yale University, and learned to mount vertebrate fossils for exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History. He began working at KU in 1896 and continued to collect in the Niobrara Chalk and other more recent formations in west­ern Kansas. The largest collection Martin made was from Miocene deposits at Rhi­noceros Hill in western Kansas.

Many of the students trained by Wil­liston, McClung, and Martin went on to build distinguished careers in vertebrate paleontology. One of these students, Barnum Brown, spent roughly half a cen­tury building a world-renowned display of Cretaceous dinosaurs for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Brown probably collected more dinosaurs than did any other person in history. He collected his first dinosaur on a field trip with Williston in 1895. It was the Tricera­tops skull still displayed on the third floor of the KU Museum of Natural History.

Claude Hibbard, a KU student from 1926 to 1934, was curator of fossil verte­brates at the museum from 1935 until 1946. Hibbard's research focused on the vertebrate communities of southwest Kansas and northwest Oklahoma. He developed, or at least perfected, a tech­nique for collecting fossils of small mam­mals by washing sediment in screens. This technique, now widely used, al­lowed scientists to obtain specimens that provide a more detailed record of whole communities of fossil animals.

Hibbard and other curators-among them H. H. Lane, P P Vaughn, T. E. Eaton, W. A. Clemens, and C. C. Black-continued the tradition of collecting, research, and teaching begun by Snow and Willis­ton. Today museum curators H. P. Schultze and L. D. Martin are responsible for this work in collaboration with their colleagues O. M. Bonner, paleontologist, and Desui Miao, collection manager. KU graduates R. W. Wilson, M. Green, and J. D. Chorn are resident associates in the di­vision. A collection of fossil birds in the museum's ornithology division and com­parative collections of Recent vertebrates in this and other museum divisions pro­vide a rich resource for research on fossil and Recent vertebrates. This resource is internationally recognized.