Francis Huntington Snow (1) was one of the original three professors that founded the University of Kansas in 1864.  As the sole science teacher, he was in charge of the “scientific cabinet” provided in the original University Charter, and Snow’s specimen cabinet (arguably the original natural history museum) now resides in the Division of Vertebrate Paleontology where it houses teaching specimens.  Snow along with a retired judge E. P. West and briefly B. F. Mudge made a few fossil collections including the famous mosasaur with skin impressions.  One of the earliest vertebrate fossils in the collection was a sidewalk slab showing a track way of a Paleozoic amphibian from near Osage Kansas.  The slab was being installed in a sidewalk in Topeka in 1873.

Samuel Wendell Williston ca. 1890s

Handel Tong Martin in Rhino Hill

Rhino Hill Quarry

The Museum of Paleontology was established in 1890 with the arrival of S.W. Williston (2) who was teaching anatomy in the medical school at Yale University.  Williston established the department of Geology at the University of Kansas, instituted a new geological survey under Chancellor Snow, and was the first dean of the medical school.  It is unlikely that any other scientist had a more profound effect on the future of the University.  He began immediately to make collections in the Upper Cretaceous of Western Kansas (3) and sampled the local Paleozoic and upper Cenozoic. He attracted an ambitious and brilliant collection of students who were responsible for much of the development of Paleontology in the Midwest and Western USA.  One of the first of these was Clarence McClung whose discovery of giant chromosomes in the testes of grasshoppers led to the recognition of sex chromosomes and whose mentoring of Robertson and Sutton laid much of the groundwork for the development of chromosomal genetics.

McClung’s master’s thesis was on the Twelve Mile Creek bison.  This bison collected by H. T. Martin and Overton may be the first bison skeleton that was mounted and put on public exhibition.  In any case it is probably the most famous bison skeleton in the world, and is figured in many textbooks.  The skeleton was part of a small herd of bison killed by hunters some 10,300 years ago in Wallace County Kansas.  They left a fluted point under a scapula of the mounted specimen.  This was the first example of a human artifact whose association was scientifically documented with an Ice Age animal, and became part of the early controversy over when man arrived in North America (4). 

The theft of the artifact not long after it was found adds a certain mystery to the discovery (5).

McClung’s doctoral dissertation was on fossil fish from the Niobrara Chalk and he succeeded Williston as Curator when Williston left for Chicago in 1902.  McClung introduced several students to vertebrate paleontology during his time as curator (1902-1912) including Remington Kellogg (later director of the National Museum of Natural History and the leading student of fossil whales);  (E.H. Taylor who established the early studies of Cenozoic amphibians and reptiles), and Alexander Wetmore (Secretary of the Smithsonian and the leading student of fossil birds) (6, 7).

In 1894 Williston led an expedition to the Big Badlands of South Dakota where he collected some important saber-toothed cat material used for theses by and Elmer Riggs (8).  Ermine C. Case was on this expedition and gives an amusing account of it (9).  Case became the leading student of North American Paleozoic tetrapods and laid the basis for the vertebrate paleontology program at the University of Michigan.  In 1895 Williston was in Wyoming collecting dinosaurs with Riggs and Barnum Brown (10).  Brown later became the greatest dinosaur collector of all time and discovered Tyrannosaurus rex.  In a way, the American Museum of Natural History may be thought of as the “house that Brown built.”  A member of the University Board of Regents (Judge Sams) accompanied Williston on this expedition and his journal gives a vivid account of fossil hunting in pioneer Wyoming (10).  Rigg’s contribution to dinosaur paleontology includes the description of the giant sauropod, Brachiosaurus.

E. H. Sellards was another KU student associated with Williston.  While in Kansas he discovered the famous Elmo Insect Beds in the Permian with giant dragonfly like forms (wingspreads close to a meter).  Sellards was a pioneer in the establishment of vertebrate paleontology in Texas and Florida so the influence of the University of Kansas on the early development of American paleontology was almost ubiquitous.

Hesperornis regalis

Handel Tong Martin

Claude Hibbard and colleagues in the field

Williston’s chief assistant and preparator was a homesteader from England, Handel Tong Martin.  When McClung left, Martin was alone with the collection and a very tight budget.  He made an arrangement with the University to sell duplicates of specimens that he collected to other museums.  This supplemented his salary and is the source of the mounted Hesperornis in the Smithsonian and important South American Collections in several museums including the London Museum of Natural History.  The Museum of Modern Vertebrates was also left in the care of its preparatory, Bunker, at this time (probably the low point for natural history studies at the University).  Martin and Bunker mentored several undergraduate students who later got graduate degrees elsewhere and had a great influence on vertebrate paleontology.  These included R. A. Stirton (largely responsible for Berkley’s rise to prominence in vertebrate paleontology); E. R. Hall (a famous mammalogist who wrote many papers in vertebrate paleontology and returned to Lawrence to reinvigorate the museum), and D. H. Dunkle who became a leading student of fossil fish and for whom the giant placoderm Dunkleosteus is named.

McClung and colleagues, 1910

Handel Tong Martin in Rhino Hill

Claude Hibbard (wearing pith helmet) and colleagues in the field

While McClung was curator, there were several important expeditions including one by Martin to South America (he had a cousin in Argentina) where he made a large collection (11).  When the University wouldn’t pay his expenses, he recovered them by selling off a major portion of the most important specimens, but a major collection still remains in Lawrence.  There was also an important collection made in the John Day region of Oregon (12) and collections in the Oligocene and Miocene of Colorado and the Eocene of Wyoming.  The collections in Colorado (13) were in an area developed by Martin for the American Museum of Natural History in the 1890’s (Martin Canyon).  One of Martin’s most important contributions was the development of the Late Miocene Rhino Hill and Edson quarries in Western Kansas (14). 

Eventually, Henry Higgins Lane became curator of both modern and fossil vertebrates effectively combining the two sister museums into one museum of natural history.  Lane had two noteable master’s students, Claude Hibbard and Morton Green.  Both worked on small vertebrates an area where the University of Kansas was becoming a powerhouse, because Bunker had developed a method for using dermestid beetles to prepare vertebrate skeletons and KU was rapidly developing the comparative material needed to utilize small fossils.  Hibbard had perfected underwater screening (12) and for the first time small vertebrates were becoming a significant portion of paleontological collections.  Hibbard followed Lane as curator of vertebrate paleontology and continued to work at the University of Kansas while he earned a PhD from the University of Michigan under former Kansan E. C. Case.  While at Kansas he developed the important Pliocene Rexroad localities in Meade County.  Hibbard was an important figure in the development of Plio/Pleistocene biostratigraphy utilizing Arvicolids as index fossils.  He worked closely with a stratigrapher, John Frye and a gastropod expert, A. Byron Leonard, in this endeavor.  Lane was replaced by E. R. Hall as director of the museum and soon after, Hibbard became Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the University of Michigan.  One of the important discoveries while Hibbard was at KU was the discovery of the Upper Carboniferous Garnett Quarry.

Museum Celebrates one hundred years of vertebrate fossil collecting

Click here to see this story as published in 1990.

A Brief History of the Fossil Mammal Collections

Click here to see this story as published in 1990, prepared for the 50th annual meeting of SVP (Hosted by the vertebrate paleontology division and the KU Natural History Museum in Lawrence, KS).