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The Living Museum 



Four Giants of 

 Paleontology 



by Edwin H. Colbert 



In 1859, the year that The Origin of 

 Species, by Charles Darwin, appeared, 

 changing forever the way in which we 

 think about ourselves, our origins, and our 

 world, Henry Fairfield Osbom was just 

 two years of age. This son of wealthy and 

 loving parents, who was supposed to be- 

 come an influential figure in the world of 

 railroads and high finance (or so his father 

 thought), was destined to become instead a 

 leading authority on the evolution of back- 

 boned animals. 



For many years Osbom was a dean and 

 professor of zoology at Columbia Univer- 

 sity and, simultaneously, a prime driving 

 force in the growth of an institution that 

 has been at the forefront of evolufionary 



On May 14, 1994, the American Mu- 

 seum of Natural History launches its 

 125th-anniversary celebration by opening 

 the LiLA AcHESON Wallace Wing of 

 Mammals and Their Extinct Rela- 

 tives. Mastodonts, giant ground sloths, 

 and other mammalian fossils from the 

 Museum's collection will be on view. 



studies since the 1880s — the American 

 Museum of Natural History. Osbom was 

 appointed president of the Museum in 

 1908 and served for twenty-five years. 



In 1871, twelve years after Darwin's 

 epochal publication, William Diller 

 Matthew was bom in Saint John, New 

 Brunswick. Later, as a young man, 

 Matthew gravitated to Columbia, where 

 he came under the influence of Osbom, 

 then presiding over the Department of Zo- 

 ology. Osbom's passion for the study of 

 vertebrate evolution was contagious. So at 

 the age of twenty-four, Matthew, who had 

 come to Columbia seeking a career in 

 mining geology, headed instead for a pale- 

 ontologist's life at the American Museum 

 as a colleague of Osbom's. 



Seventeen years after that fateful year 

 of 1859, William King Gregory was bom 

 in Greenwich Village, New York City. 

 Eventually he also attended Columbia. In 

 1899 he became Osborn's assistant, 

 thereby initiating his own long and distin- 

 guished career at Columbia and at the 

 American Museum, where he was one of 

 those rare individuals on the curatorial 

 staff — a native New Yorker. 



For more than three decades the three 

 men — the mentor and his two students — 

 worked together at the Museum cataloging 

 and trying to make sense of its rapidly ex- 

 panding collection of fossil vertebrates. 

 Each year, the Museum's famous bone 

 collectors, such as Bamum Brown, would 

 bring in thousands of specimens, newly 

 freed from tons of rock. Osbom was inter- 

 ested in extinct reptiles and mammals, par- 

 ticularly mammals. Matthew was an inter- 

 nationally respected authority on 

 mammalian evolution, and Gregory was 



Henry Fairfield Osbom 



62 Natural History 5/94 



