Biographical Si^etch 15 



SERVICES TO THE AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY 



1903-1928 



We have already given a preliminary outline of Dean's activities at the Museum. In 

 1903, his friend Professor Henry Fairfield Osborn, who was also his colleague in the De- 

 partment of Zoology at Columbia and who was now President of the American Museum 

 of Natural History, arranged for him to come to the Museum and take charge of the fossil 

 fishes in the department of vertebrate palaeontology. At first the embryonic division of 

 fishes was not considered large enough to be a department by itself and Dean served as 

 curator of the "Department of Reptiles and Fishes," collaborating in the former field with 

 Miss Mary C. Dickerson. Meanwhile, by arrangement with Columbia, the great 

 J. S. Newberry collection of fossil fishes was transferred to the Museum. This included 

 Newberry's valuable collection of Devonian placoderms (arthrodires) and sharks. The 

 extensive collections of fossil fishes made by the late Professor E. D. Cope were presented 

 through the generosity of Morris K. Jessup, the late President of the Museum. Also 

 the Reverend D. Stuart Dodge presented a large collection of Cretaceous fishes from Mt. 

 Lebanon, Syria. 



Dean, as already noted, thereafter published in the Museum memoirs some of his 

 important papers on various arthrodires and other Devonian fishes. Through the 

 generosity of Mr. Cleveland H. Dodge he was able to extend and amplify the collections 

 of fossil fishes. With the assistance of one of his old students. Dr. Louis Hussakof, who 

 was later appointed Curator of the Department of Fishes, the collections of fossil fishes 

 were duly catalogued and installed, field expeditions were conducted in search of exhibi- 

 tion and study materials of the spoonbill sturgeon, the gar-pike, Amia, the brook lamprey, 

 etc. A nearly complete skull and shoulder plates of the giant Dimchthys terrelli were 

 assembled, mounted, and placed on exhibition. Life-like restorations of the principal 

 types of antiarchs {Ptenchthys), placoderms (Coccosteus), ganoids, lung-fishes, and acan- 

 thodian sharks, which were found as fossils in the Lower Old Red Sandstone of Great 

 Britain were prepared and assembled in a "Devonian Aquarium." A synoptic collection 

 of the principal orders of fossil fishes was also placed on exhibition. He also induced the 

 President and Trustees of the Museum to set aside a large exhibition hall for the collec- 

 tions of recent fishes in the projected new east wing of the Museum, and laid the basic 

 plans for the hall, the completion of which he entrusted to another of his old students (the 

 present writer). 



THE BIBLIOGRAPHY OF FISHES 



1916, 1917, 1923 



When Dean became a graduate student under Professor J. S. Newberry, he began 

 to accumulate a bibliography of fishes, including titles on embryology, fossil and recent 

 fishes; it is a remarkable example of his patience, persistence, and astonishing energy that 

 he managed to keep steadily enlarging this bibliography, in spite of all his prolonged ex- 



