Establishing vertebrate paleontology at Chicago's Field Columbian Museum, 1893—1898

Abstract

By the late nineteenth century, as a consequence of the costly, far-flung, labor-intensive, and specimen-centered nature of the discipline, American vertebrate paleontology had become centralized at large collections maintained by a few universities and major natural history museums. Foremost among the latter group were the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia; the American Museum of Natural History, New York; the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, DC; the Carnegie Museum, Pittsburgh; and the Field Columbian Museum, Chicago. There is an extensive body of popular and historical literature reviewing the establishment and early development of the vertebrate paleontology programs at most of these institutions, especially the American Museum. The Field Columbian Museum, however, has received relatively little attention in this literature. The present paper begins to redress this imbalance by reviewing the establishment of vertebrate paleontology at the Field Columbian Museum from the museum's foundation in 1893, through the end of 1898, when the museum added a vertebrate paleontologist to its curatorial staff. An account of the Field Columbian Museum's first expedition for fossil vertebrates in the summer of 1898 is included.