the legacy of the mastodon

[...]... tradition in the era after the world of Jefferson and Franklin gave way to a newly populous and restless America It involves the early history of exploration of the West, the role of the state and national geological surveys and economic aspects of geology, the opening of the West to waves of emigration and development, and the role of the new railroads It ends with the announcement of the closing of the American... being the French-Indian wars, a series of conflicts between England and France that lasted from 1689 to 1763 The last phase of the conflict began in 1754, at a time when the French controlled the St Lawrence River valley, parts of the Great Lakes, and the whole eastern Mississippi Valley together with their southern lands around the mouth of the Mississippi The British possessions in America were all on the. .. Sitting Bull there would be no danger to us.” But this is not simply a story about fossils and the men who collected them The story of the discovery and exploitation of the western fossil fields is in every sense tied directly to, and contingent upon, the greater history of the opening and population of the American West Its context is therefore nothing less than the emergence of the new nation and... American Museum of Natural History, for its collection of the letters and notebooks of Edward Drinker Cope Other Cope letters were consulted by permission of the American Philosophical Society and the Academy of Natural Sciences The academy archives (which contain some copies of letters belonging to the College of Physicians, Philadelphia) are also the source for quotations from the correspondence of Joseph... had the capacity to drag hundreds of pounds of rocks around with them for two years They did, however, bring back a few small mineral specimens and at least one piece of a fossil fish, found in a bank of the Missouri River The first consistent discoveries of fossils in the West were a byproduct of the fur trade and were collected by people linked to the series of trading forts that sprang up along the. .. (1894–1973), my professor at Harvard and the greatest student and teacher of fossil vertebrates of the twentieth century Romer taught me not only to be a paleontologist but also to love the history of this science One of the delights of collecting Early Permian fossils with him in the hardscrabble country of north-central Texas was his daily recounting of stories of the early collectors there, such as... too much) of danger Romer was perfectly at ease in the comfort of the Harvard Faculty Club or around a campfire deep in the Argentinean wilderness However, he could not live with only one side of this duality the professor or the cowboy, the scientist or the romantic He had to be both This dichotomy was not typical of Romer alone; it is really the story of this whole subject No matter the level of abstraction... abstraction of the evolutionary theories they support or generate, the study of fossil vertebrates is dominated by the collecting of the fossils themselves While an art historian does not have to have acquired a serious reputation as a painter or sculptor, most vertebrate paleontologists still earn their spurs in the field; explorations and discoveries are as much a driving part of their credentials as the theoretical... Agassiz, the first director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, in the early 1870s Perhaps Romer’s best story about himself (and about bone hunting) concerns the day in the 1950s when he was unearthing the bones of a fossil reptile far out in the dry north Texas cattle country Along came a cowboy riding the line, checking for downed sections of barbed wire fence He was the authentic item: lariat on the. .. the people and the land they explored On the other it is a story of the relationships between individual personalities and the science they developed A third theme is more The Oregon Trail (and others), featuring the principal tributaries of the Missouri River, forts, and migration routes before 1860 (from Robert Ellison, Fort Bridger, Wyoming: A BriefHistory, 1931) fossil hunters on the frontier 9 .