>>LOWELL DINGUS:
Barnum Brown was,
by all accounts, the
best dinosaur collector
who ever lived.
He began his career here
at AMNH in 1897 going out
on expeditions to
the American West
first in search of fossil
mammals but of course
later with the
dinosaur expeditions.
He started as a field
assistant and worked his way up
to be curator in the
Department of Vertebrate
Paleontology, head of all
the dinosaur collections.
>>MARK NORELL: The
majority of specimens
that we have on display
were collected by him.
I mean, he was the
one who collected
the first Tyrannosaurus
Rex specimens.
He was the one who collected
the Albertosaurus specimens.
He was such a popular
and important guy
during his lifetime
that he really, really,
really kind of was the museum.
>>SPEAKER: Curator Barnum
Brown found and brought back
many dinosaurs.
Here is the head of
dreaded Tyrannosaurus.
The skeleton of a Pteranodon.
>>DINGUS: We'd known for a
long time, both Mark and I,
that there were 13
boxes of documents
and correspondence up in the
archives of the Vertebrate
Paleontology
Department and no one
had ever written a comprehensive
biography of Barnum before.
We felt like, given that
it was about a century
after his discovery
of Tyrannosaurus,
it was the right time
to celebrate his life.
He happened to be born and
grow up during the first Bone
Rush out into the American West
led by Othniel Marsh at Yale
and his arch rival E.D.
Cope at the Philadelphia
Academy of Sciences
beginning in the 1870s.
>>NORELL: Barnum Brown collected
a number of Tyrannosaurus
in the Hell Creek Formation
in the first decade
of the 20th Century.
A number of them
weren't that complete
but they knew that there was
this big hypercarnivore which
was out there.
He found things like,
you know, a lower
jaw, part of a brain case.
Finally he found this specimen,
what would become the 5027
Specimen, and the
skull, which is still
amongst the most beautiful
Tyrannosaurus skulls known,
was found in one
single chert block.
>>DINGUS: It was quite a
sensation right from the start.
From the announcement
in the New York Times
that they had discovered
Tyrannosaurus,
there was a full page
article about the discovery,
and that continued all
the way through until they
unveiled the mount for the
public in the exhibition halls.
>>NORELL: He would
go out on the road
to give lectures and people
would flock around his trains
when they came.
He was one of the sort of
early sort of celebrity
paleontologists in the sense
that he had his own CBS radio
show each week which he
would talk about things.
He was the Dinosaur
Consultant for Walt Disney
and Shostakovitch for Fantasia.
>>DINGUS: I don't think it's
too much to say that we all
work in his shadow, especially
if you're working on dinosaurs.
It's not only the fossils that
you're probably incorporating
into your studies, no
matter what kind of dinosaur
you're working on,
but he was also
trained as a geologist at
the University of Kansas.
And although he didn't take a
lot of detailed field notes,
he had a very good eye for
the stratigraphy, the sequence
of rock layers, in
the field area where
he worked all over the world.
No matter how hard you try,
especially here at the American
Museum, you can never really
walk out of Barnum's shadow.
