Henry Fairfield Osborn
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. was an American paleontologist, geologist and eugenics advocate. He was professor of anatomy at Columbia University, president of the American Museum of Natural History for 25 years and a cofounder of the American Eugenics Society.
Among his significant contributions include naming the dinosaurs Tyrannosaurus and Velociraptor, his widely used system of names for dental cusps and other features of mammalian teeth, as well as his research on fossil proboscideans.
Osborn was one of the most well known scientists in the United States during his own lifetime, “second only to Albert Einstein", and was a prominent public advocate for the existence of evolution. Active during the eclipse of Darwinism, Osborn was a prominent opponent of natural selection as a mechanism of evolution, favouring the now discredited orthogenesis theory of which he was one of the most prominent advocates.
In addition to being an advocate of eugenics, he was a Nordicist, viewing the white race as superior, and supported immigration controls. Osborn's political connections allowed him to gain significant funding for the American Museum of Natural History, using this to redesign and expand the museums exhibits, which he used to reflect his own views on "racialism, eugenics, and immigration".
Early life and education
Family
Henry Fairfield Osborn was born in Fairfield, Connecticut on August 8, 1857, in a family of distinction. He was the eldest son of shipping magnate and railroad tycoon William Henry Osborn and Virginia Reed Osborn.His maternal grandparents were Jonathan Sturges, a prominent New York businessman and arts patron who was a direct descendant of Jonathan Sturges, a U.S. Representative from Connecticut, and Mary Pemberton Cady, a direct descendant of prominent educator Ebenezer Pemberton. His maternal aunt, Amelia Sturges, was the first wife of J. P. Morgan, but died of tuberculosis soon after their wedding.
His younger brother was William Church Osborn, who served as president of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and married philanthropist and social reformer Alice Clinton Hoadley Dodge, a daughter of William E. Dodge Jr.
Education
From 1873 to 1877, Osborn studied at Princeton University, obtaining a B.A. in geology and archaeology, where he was mentored by paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope. Two years later, Osborn took a special course of study in anatomy in the College of Physicians and Surgeons and Bellevue Medical School of New York under Dr. William H. Welch, and subsequently studied embryology and comparative anatomy under Thomas Huxley at London, as well as Francis Maitland Balfour at Cambridge University, England.In 1880, Osborn obtained a doctorate in paleontology from Princeton, becoming a lecturer in biology and professor of comparative anatomy from the same university between 1883 and 1890.
Career
In 1891, Osborn was hired by Columbia University as a professor of zoology; simultaneously, he accepted a position at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, where he served as the curator of a newly formed Department of Vertebrate Paleontology.Fossil hunting
As a curator, he assembled a remarkable team of fossil hunters and preparators, including William King Gregory, Roy Chapman Andrews, Barnum Brown, and Charles R. Knight.Long a member of the US Geological Survey, Osborn became its senior vertebrate paleontologist in 1924. He led many fossil-hunting expeditions into the American Southwest, starting with his first to Colorado and Wyoming in 1877. Osborn conducted research on Tyrannosaurus brains by cutting open fossilized braincases with a diamond saw.
On November 23, 1897, he was elected member of the Boone and Crockett Club, a wildlife conservation organization founded by Theodore Roosevelt and George Bird Grinnell. Thanks to his considerable family wealth and personal connections, he succeeded Morris K. Jesup as the president of the AMNH's Board of Trustees in 1908, serving until 1933, during which time he accumulated one of the finest fossil collections in the world.
Additionally, Osborn served as president of the New York Zoological Society from 1909 to 1925.
He was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1886. He accumulated a number of prizes for his work in paleontology. In 1901, Osborn was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He described and named Ornitholestes in 1903, Tyrannosaurus rex and Albertosaurus in 1905, Pentaceratops in 1923, and Velociraptor in 1924.
In 1929 Osborn was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences.
American Museum of Natural History
His legacy at the American Museum has proved more enduring than his scientific reputation. Edward J. Larson described Osborn as "a first-rate science administrator and a third-rate scientist." Indeed, Osborn's greatest contributions to science ultimately lay in his efforts to popularize it through visual means. At his urging, staff members at the American Museum of Natural History invested new energy in display, and the museum became one of the pre-eminent sites for exhibition in the early twentieth century as a result. The murals, habitat dioramas, and dinosaur mounts executed during his tenure at the museum attracted millions of visitors, and inspired other museums to imitate his innovations. But his decision to invest heavily in exhibition also alienated certain members of the scientific community and angered curators hoping to spend more time on their own research. Additionally, his efforts to imbue the museum's exhibits and educational programs with his own racist and eugenist beliefs disturbed many of his contemporaries and have marred his legacy.Research
Osborn was a supporter of the "tritubercular theory" of the evolution of mammalian teeth, originally proposed by Edward Drinker Cope based on fossil tooth morphology, and a rival to the "concrescence theory" proposed by German dentist and physician Carl Röse based on analysis of the development of modern mammal teeth. The tritubercular theory held that the multicusped molar teeth of mammals evolved from single cusped teeth like those found in reptiles, and that a three-cusped pattern is the ancestral organisation of mammalian molars. The tritubercular theory was criticised by Röse and other contemporary scholars for being incogruent with knowledge obtained from analysis of modern tooth development, and was corrected to fix some issues by later scholars. Osborn's system of naming for the cusps and other elements of mammalian teeth has been widely adopted by later scholars.In 1922, Osborn named Hesperopithecus '', a supposed genus of North American ape from Nebraska, based on an isolated tooth. It later turned out to be a junior synonym of Prosthennops, a peccary, to Osborn's considerable embarrassment.
Osborn's research on proboscideans, the group containing elephants and their extinct relatives has been described as a "modern stimulus and driving force for research" on the group. In particular, his posthumous monograph on the group, published in two volumes in 1936 and 1942, has been called a "landmark of evolution and natural history of the Proboscidea". While the monograph has been regarded as being a monumental and significant work, later researchers have criticised Osborn for overestimating the number of proboscidean species. His work on North American mammoth taxonomy has been described as introducing considerable taxonomic confusion for arbitrarily naming a neotype specimen for the Columbian mammoth without adequate justification, as well as introducing several mammoth species that are now regarded as synonymous with the Columbian mammoth. Osborn largely failed to take into account the effect of tooth wear on the shape of mammoth teeth, which was a partial cause of the confusion.
Osborn was involved in organising the American Museum of Natural History's "Central Asiatic Expeditions" to Eastern Asia in the 1920s headed by Roy Chapman Andrews, with a major goal being to find proof for the "Out of Asia" theory of mankind's origins that Osborn advocated. Osborn described a number of species based on remains found during the expeditions, such as Andrewsarchus as well as several now invalid species of Paraceratherium''.
He was a member of the American Association for Anatomy.
Public outreach
Osborn was one of the most well known scientists in the United States during his own lifetime, “second only to Albert Einstein", and was the author of a number of books aimed at popular audiences. During the 1920s, Osborn became an outspoken public advocate of evolution against religious critics. During the 1925 Scopes Monkey Trial regarding the teaching of human evolution, Osborn wrote a book The Earth Speaks to Bryan responding to the lawyer William Jennings Bryan, a critic of evolution and prosecutor on the case, a compilation of speeches defending evolution and suggesting that evolution and religion were compatible.Theories
Dawn Man Theory
Osborn developed his own evolutionary theory of human origins called the "Dawn Man Theory". His theory was founded on the discovery of Piltdown Man which was dated to the Late Pliocene. Writing before Piltdown was exposed as a hoax, the Eoanthropus or "Dawn Man" Osborn maintained sprang from a common ancestor with the ape during the Oligocene period which he believed developed entirely separately during the Miocene. Therefore, Osborn argued that all apes had evolved entirely parallel to the ancestors of man. Osborn himself wrote:While believing in common ancestry between man and ape, Osborn denied that this ancestor was ape-like. The common ancestor between man and ape Osborn always maintained was more human than ape. Writing to Arthur Keith in 1927, he remarked "when our Oligocene ancestor is found it will not be an ape, but it will be surprisingly pro-human". His student William K. Gregory called Osborn's idiosyncratic view on man's origins as a form of "Parallel Evolution", but many creationists misinterpreted Osborn, greatly frustrating him, and believed he was asserting humankind had never evolved from a lower life form.