Brown inspects one of his specimens at the American
Museum of Natural History.
The following year Brown joined the museum staff for its first expedition to excavate dinosaur skeletons outside Medicine Bow, Wyoming. It was an unforgettable trip: For the rest of his life, Brown harbored tremendous pride in his first professional find, an enormous plant-eating dinosaur similar to, but even longer than, the then recently discovered Apatosaurus. “I was . . . fortunate in discovering a partial skeleton of . . . Diplodocus. This was the first dinosaur excavated by any American Museum expedition, and here I introduced the use of plaster of paris in excavating fossils.” At age 24 Brown had laid the cornerstone for what would become the world’s most famous collection of dinosaurs. Furthermore, by covering the 150-million-year-old hindquarters of that giant sauropod in a sturdy plaster jacket—a method that enabled him to safely ship and store the beast’s delicate remains—he helped establish a critical collecting technique that is still used by paleontologists around the world.
And Brown had barely begun. After returning from Patagonia, he discovered the first T. rex fossil, in 1902 in Hell Creek, Montana. He then traveled across the Canadian border to the Red Deer River, where, between 1910 and 1915, he excavated the sharp-toothed tyrannosaur relative Albertosaurus as well as the smaller, ostrich-shaped Struthiomimus. There he also found tanklike armored dinosaurs like Edmontonia and Euoplocephalus; elaborately crested, plant-eating duckbills, including Corythosaurus and Parasaurolophus; and fierce horned brutes like Chasmosaurus and Centrosaurus, relatives of Triceratops. These finds provided the first comprehensive look at North America’s dinosaur fauna of 75 million years ago.
Nor was Brown satisfied with simply collecting dinosaur bones. On a trip to the Greek isle of Samos from 1923 to 1924—an expedition he undertook with his intrepid second wife, Lilian—Brown hired a team of 18 men and 6 women to haul dirt in baskets for “the attractive sum of 35 drachmas (70 cents) per day for the men and 20 drachmas per day for the girls.” In the wake of the Greco–Turkish War of 1921–22, the island was inundated with Greek refugees desperate for work, so Brown did not have any difficulty finding willing workers. Their extensive quarrying generated 56 cases of spectacular fossils “representing three species of three-toed horses, rhinoceroses . . . many species of antelope and gazelle . . . birds, and a variety of carnivorous mammals.” The jewel was an exquisitely preserved skull of an early relative of giraffes, Samotherium.
Brown’s diary (above) describes “Fossils
located 1903,” like the
skeleton of Mosasaurus,
a marine reptile with paddlelike limbs. In
Montana in 1902, he dug up the four-foot-long
femur of the first
Tyrannosaurus rex found (below).
The peripatetic Brown collected so many specimens on his travels that even today dozens of large boxes of his fossils have yet to be opened. Crates labeled “mammals from Samos” and “ornithomimid from Hell Creek” rest on sanitized racks in the storerooms of the American Museum of Natural History simply because there are not enough staff workers to unpack them, remove the plaster, and prepare them all. As Brown neared his 90th birthday in 1963, his successor at the museum, Edwin Colbert, marveled at how much of the museum was Brown’s single-handed work: “There are, in our Tyrannosaur Hall, 36 North American dinosaurs on display. . . . You collected 27, an unsurpassed achievement.”
For all of Brown’s success as a collector, his direct impact as a
scientist was strangely modest, compromised by his time abroad and by
his laxity in publishing his discoveries. The CV that he compiled for
his memoirs—which he never finished—shows that there were only five
years between 1897 and his retirement in 1942 in which he did not
participate in a major expedition. Yet he penned few scientific papers,
and those that he did publish are mostly short notes. On the other
hand, his longer publications, like his monograph on Protoceratops, a
Mongolian relative of the great horned dinosaurs, are classics, both
for the freshness of the presentation and the quality of the analysis.
Brown’s real legacy lies with his discoveries themselves, which still serve as a foundation for numerous geologic and biological research projects in paleontology. His excavations in the Missouri Breaks—the site of the renowned T. rex burial ground in Hell Creek—yielded not only Tyrannosaurus but also the bizarre Pachycephalosaurus, whose head was topped with a 10-inch-thick crown of solid bone, and the best-known horned dinosaur, Triceratops. At the same time, Brown documented the sequence of rock layers at the site that reveal how the nonavian dinosaurs dramatically died off 65 million years ago. The lowest layer of coal marks the boundary between the underlying Hell Creek Formation, with its rich dinosaur fauna, and the younger overlying Tullock Formation, with its surviving fauna of small mouselike and shrewlike mammals. This is the world’s best record of the faunal and floral changes that occurred worldwide at the end of the age of dinosaurs and the beginning of the age of mammals.
