The skeleton of T. rex stands upright in 1915.
A few notes and poems from admiring women remain in the archives, although legend has it that a loyal assistant removed most of these from Brown’s desk after his death. Brown’s roving eye was not lost on his second wife, Lilian, who in a letter to a friend compared the polygamous traditions of the East with those of the West. “After all, this is better than the Christian way of living,” she wrote. “Our men have many wives on the side, and the only thing that makes it wrong is the fact that they might be found out??????”
Lilian was apparently ready to forgive Brown some of his wanderings. As Brown’s daughter, Frances, relates in a self-published 1987 biography, Let’s Call Him Barnum, he and Lilian married in 1922 in India, where Lilian was ostensibly on a world tour with an aunt. “The more likely scenario was that she, like others before her, had decided that Barnum was the husband she wanted, and if he would not come after her, she would go after him, even if it meant crossing a couple of continents.”
Lonely, and as his daughter states, “ripe for the plucking,” more than a decade after the death of his first wife, Marion, in 1910, Brown rushed to meet Lilian in Calcutta “and quickly decided to make her his wife.” Lilian, no doubt, expected to be whisked away on a romantic Oriental honeymoon, but as his daughter relates, “that Barnum was not youthfully starry-eyed and glowing over this marriage” was clear from his choice of activities for the nuptial reception: “The bride and groom spent the afternoon of their wedding day in the chairs of the only two English dentists in Calcutta. To Barnum this was just a routine practicality.”
With Brown, fossils almost always came first, and Lilian quickly adapted, helping to collect and keep records in the field for her husband. Health risks were rampant: In the lowlands of Burma, Brown contracted malaria, but his wife saved his life with round-the-clock nursing until his fever broke. Their marriage lasted for 40 years, until Brown’s death in 1963, probably because Lilian possessed a streak of independence almost as wide as her husband’s. After their wedding, she set off on her own to Kashmir for a solitary honeymoon. Along the way, she caught the eye of an eminent maharaja, who lavishly entertained her and permitted her to interact with his harem—an honor not previously bestowed upon any westerner.
As colorful as Brown’s adventures were, they are now largely
forgotten, while his fossil finds are more prominent than ever. His
discoveries permeate the American Museum of Natural History, whether
one casually strolls through the public exhibition spaces or rummages
intently through the cloistered collections. When the museum renovated
its fossil halls in the 1990s and its dinosaur storerooms in 2000, we
faced the daunting task of conserving and moving Brown’s magnificent
collection. It was humbling to see firsthand how many of the specimens
that draw millions of visitors to the museum each year were unearthed
through Brown’s efforts. Of the 80-odd specimens in the renovated
halls, 32 were found by Brown and his field crews.
These foot-wide neck vertebrae, unearthed by Brown in
Wyoming in 1900,
once held up the head of
Dynamosaurus imperiosus, later and better
known as
Tyrannosaurus rex.
It was our special privilege to work with Brown’s most famous specimen. During the renovation, our most difficult and delicate job was to remount Brown’s T. rex by modifying its upright “Godzilla” posture into a more scientifically accurate horizontal posture. When Brown and Osborn originally designed their upright mount, they built a one-sixth scale model of the skeleton, with each bone carved out of wood, and then mounted it on a wire framework. We reworked the same model to realign the posture for our new mount. Then, each immense yet fragile bone had to be lifted gently off the old armature, cleaned, conserved, and carefully repositioned on the new armature, much as Brown and his preparators had painstakingly done almost a century before. It was an emotionally draining exercise because the skeleton represents one of evolution’s most iconic specimens; its spectacular four-foot-long skull gave humanity its first face-to-face glimpse of the most imposing and ferocious predator ever to walk the continents. Our remounting took more than a dozen dedicated scientists and fossil preparators almost two years to complete, but Brown’s masterpiece will glower menacingly at new generations of entranced visitors for decades to come.
Brown’s incomparable ancient menagerie—along with a few boxes of notes and several cabinets of photos—also serves as his epitaph. Today all of Brown’s immediate family and almost all of his contemporaries are dead, and no known recordings of him exist. It is therefore impossible to know his true mind. Field portraits snapped at different periods show him progressing from a proud but youthful apprentice, sitting in a quarry with his first dinosaur find, to a bald yet dapper patriarch, confronting an outcrop in his full-length beaver-skin coat. One can see his determined face but cannot probe the thoughts inside.
Beyond a consistent willingness, or even gleeful propensity, to take calculated risks in his professional and personal life, Brown remains something of an enigma. He was a master collector who disdained recording the details of his monumental discoveries. He was a meticulous researcher who found little time for publishing his scientific insights. He was a world-renowned, New York–based scientist who seemed most at ease with strangers in field settings far from home. He was a husband who delighted in his wives’ company but felt unconstrained by conventional rules
But at least we still have one unforgettable and still tangible connection with Brown. It is extraordinarily powerful to sit in our archives, gingerly grasping the tattered, yellow, century-old letter that Brown wrote to Osborn from the badlands of Hell Creek describing humanity’s first encounter with a T. rex in 1902. Befitting of Brown, our eyes struggle to decipher his rambling scrawl, but once comprehended, the words are quite self-assured, if disarmingly simple: “Quarry No. 1 contains [several bones] of a large carnivorous dinosaur not described by Marsh. . . . I have never seen anything like it from the Cretaceous.”
