Beyond Charles Knight: Women paleoartists at the American Museum of Natural History in the early twentieth century

ABSTRACT Under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn, Charles Knight helped shape popular images of the prehistoric past in the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen turies. Although he was the most famous, Charles Knight was not the only paleoartist working at the American Museum of Natural History at this time. Behind the scenes, there were several women paleoartists who made significant contributions to museum displays and publications illustrating the prehistoric world. Often overlooked, this chapter highlights the contributions of Elisabeth Rungius Fulda, Helen Ziska, Lindsey Morris Sterling, and Margret Joy Flinsch Buba.

Of Chimeras, Harmony, and Kintsugi: Towards a Historicist Epistemology of Paleontological Reconstruction, Theory-Change, and Exploring Heuristics

I analyze the epistemic strategies used by paleontologists between the early 19th and early 20th centuries to reconstruct features of ancient organisms from fossilized bodies and footprints by presenting two heuristics: (1) a “claim of harmony” which posits the harmonious interaction of natural objects in order for complex systems to be simplified and (2) the “kintsugi heuristic” which is used inter-theoretically to explore new claims of harmony. I apply these to three successive historical cases: Georges Cuvier’s laws of correlation, the panpsychist paleontology of Edward Drinker Cope, and the single-character approach of Henry Fairfield Osborn.

Human tools of the European tertiary? Artefacts, brains and minds in evolutionist reasoning, 1870–1920

This essay explores evolutionary reasoning and notions of progress at the turn of the twentieth century by focusing on the various interpretations used to understand eoliths. These ‘dawn’ (Greek eos ) ‘stones’ (Greek lithos ) were contested objects and I focus on three geographic episodes in which they were used to support scientific, and sometimes socially inspired, accounts of human origins. Particular attention is paid to the work of Gabriel de Mortillet (1821–98), James Reid Moir (1879–1944) and Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935).

Henry Fairfield Osborn and Jurassic Dinosaur Reconnaissance in the San Juan Basin, Along the Colorado-Utah Border, 1893-1900

Henry Fairfield Osborn, vertebrate paleontologist at the American Museum of Natural History, did virtually all of his fieldwork by proxy. Working mostly from his New York office, he detailed a score of fieldworkers to locate and claim fossil localities in advance of collectors from rival museums. This history of a long-forgotten Jurassic dinosaur reconnaissance in the San Juan Basin, which was materially unsuccessful, explores how Osborn found and evaluated potential new field localities. He was relentless in pursuit of fossils, especially in the face of worthy competition. He received his first unsolicited tip about fossils along the Colorado-Utah border in 1893. A collector sent to scout the locality found Jurassic dinosaurs in poor condition and left them behind. Following a second tip about fossils in the same region in 1899—at the height of the second Jurassic dinosaur rush—Osborn sent two more expeditions to search the area. Both of these parties returned empty-handed also. Reliable locality data regarding the presence of typical Jurassic vertebrates would have been very useful to geologists like Whitman Cross, who was then attempting to correlate beds west of the Rockies with better-known strata on the eastern slope. But, in order to maintain a competitive advantage, Osborn kept this locality data to himself.