Barnum Brown

Barnum Brown (February 12, 1873 – February 5, 1963), commonly referred to as Mr. Bones, was an American paleontologist. Named after the circus showman P. T. Barnum, he discovered the first documented remains of Tyrannosaurus during a career that made him one of the most famous fossil hunters working from the late Victorian era into the early 20th century. Sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), Brown traversed the country bargaining and trading for fossils. His field was not limited to dinosaurs. He was known to collect or obtain anything of possible scientific value. Often, he simply sent money to have fossils shipped to the AMNH, and any new specimen of interest often resulted in a flurry of letters between the discoverer and Brown.

After working a handful of years in Wyoming for AMNH in the late 1890s, Brown led an expedition to the Hell Creek Formation of Southeastern Montana. There, in 1902, he discovered and excavated the first documented remains of Tyrannosaurus Rex.

The Hell Creek digs produced extravagant quantities of fossils, enough to fill up whole train cars. As was common practice then, Brown's crews used controlled blasts of dynamite to remove the tons of rock covering their fossil discoveries. Everything was moved with horse-drawn wagons and pure manpower. Seldom was any site data recorded.

After nearly a decade in Montana, Brown headed to Alberta, Canada, and the Red Deer Rivernear Drumheller. There, Brown and his crew spent the middle 1910s floating down the river on a flatboat, stopping along the way to prospect for fossils at promising-looking sites. Trying to outdo them along the same stretch of river was the famous Sternberg family of fossil hunters. There was a playful, friendly rivalry between the Browns and the Sternbergs, and their competing discoveries went down in the annals of paleontology.

In 1910, in one of their most significant finds, Brown's team uncovered several hind feet from a group of Albertosaurus in Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park. For years the fossils were largely forgotten in the recesses of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. In the 1990s, Dr. Phil Currie, then Head of Dinosaur Research at the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Canada, relocated the site of the bones using only an old photograph as a guide. He recommenced excavations there in the summer of 1998, and examination of the site under the Tyrrell Museum's auspices lasted until August, 2005. However, after Currie took a new job at the University of Alberta, a new crew began working at the site in 2006, intending to continue for several years.