The Museum of Natural History has an outstanding collection of fossil mammals from the Ice Age (Pleistocene) of Kansas. Much of this material, especially of small animals such as rodents, was obtained by Claude W. Hibbard during the time (1935-1946), when he served as assis­tant curator of vertebrate paleontol­ogy.

Hibbard was born at Toronto, Kansas, in 1905, and received his B.A. (1933) and M.A. (1934) degrees from the University of Kansas. His first fieldwork after his appointment was in Meade County, Kansas, where he investigated a report about fossil mastodon bones found by Civilian Conservation Corps workers. There he developed techniques for recovering bones of small mammals (such as rodents, shrews, and bats) by underwater screening. In this procedure, sediment samples are placed on screens and washed under water. Fine particles wash through the screen leaving behind larger fragments which may include tooth and jaw fragments of small mam­mals. This method was so successful that Hibbard returned to Meade County for thirty-nine consecutive years, obtaining information about dozens of vertebrate species whose fossil histories were unknown. Al­though the wet screening technique was not original (J. B. Hatcher re­ported on it in 1896), Hibbard firmly established its utility. He said, "I collect outcrops, not fossils." Since World War Il, the method has been used all over the world and has revolutionized our knowledge of small fossil mammals.

In 1946 Hibbard left Kansas for a position at the University of Michi­gan, where he had obtained a Ph.D. in 1941. After his death in 1973, a memorial symposium on the Michi­gan campus was attended by more than eighty scientists representing thirty-one universities and museums including the University of Kansas--abundant testimony to his impor­tance to both Kansas and Michigan as a collector and researcher in vertebrate paleontology.