If you're seeing this message, it means we're having trouble loading external resources on our website.

If you're behind a web filter, please make sure that the domains *.kastatic.org and *.kasandbox.org are unblocked.

Main content

Barnum Brown: The man who discovered Tyrannosaurus rex

Known as the greatest dinosaur collector of all time, Barnum Brown helped the American Museum of Natural History establish its world-class fossil collection. Museum Research Associate Lowell Dingus and Chair of the Division of Paleontology Mark Norell recently traced Brown's extraordinary career from a frontier farm to the world's top fossil sites to the halls of the Museum in the book, Barnum Brown: The Man Who Discovered Tyrannosaurus Rex. Created by American Museum of Natural History.

Want to join the conversation?

  • leaf blue style avatar for user Anthony Jacquez
    Barnum was known as the "Known as the greatest dinosaur collector of all time"
    How many dinosaur's did he collect in the period of his life?
    (7 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • duskpin ultimate style avatar for user 🚀The knowledge Hunter🔭
    is there only one whole Skeleton of T-Rex ?
    then were did the other T-Rex go ?
    Did they jumped to the sea? :)
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • leaf green style avatar for user weber
    I noticed at there was a 1905 newspaper headline that claimed the t rex specimen was thought to be 3 million years old. Was that the prevailing theory among scientists regarding the age of these fossils in Barnum's time or just a newspaper reporter's notion of old?
    (2 votes)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
    • leafers sapling style avatar for user Peter Collingridge
      Interestingly, the first radiometric dating of rocks was carried out in 1905. The samples were predicted to be 92 to 570 million years old (later found to be 410 million to 2.2 billion years when the methods were refined). By the 1920s it was becoming apparent that the Earth was a few billion years old. However, it wasn't until the early 1930s that geologists began to take radiometric dating seriously.

      Before that, Lord Kelvin's prediction that the Earth was 20 - 40 million years old was generally accepted. This was based on the cooling of the Earth. It wasn't until 1903 that radioactive decay was discovered which later was shown to challenge his calculation since it meant the Earth had an additional heat source he had been unaware of. There were other predictions based on sedimentation rates and salt deposition, which gave predictions between 3 million and 1.6 billion years old.

      So it seems likely, that the newspaper headline was giving what was at the time, the scientific opinion. I don't know exactly how they came up with this number, but presumably it was based on the layers of rocks and predictions of how old each layer was.
      (1 vote)
  • male robot donald style avatar for user joshua.villarreal
    how do they know exactly know where the fossils exactly are or if they could smell the bones.
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
    • piceratops ultimate style avatar for user Nathaniel J
      Howdy,
      The thing is, they don't know where the fossils are exactly. Paleontologists use geologic maps and other things of that nature to find the best location to find fossils and then they prospect, or start walking around that area, looking closely at the rock to see if they can find parts of exposed fossils. And, no Joshua, they cannot smell the fossils since over time dirt would take away it's smell. If it didn't than it just rot away.
      Hope that helped!
      (1 vote)
  • duskpin ultimate style avatar for user tysumner
    Are dilophosaurs real? if they are how big were they? srry if the name is spelled incorrectly
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • male robot hal style avatar for user Evan L.
    At , it shows a thing from the past that says the specimen was 3,000,000 years old, which is false. What were dating methods used back then, and how do they compare to the accuracy of those today?
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
    • leafers sapling style avatar for user Peter Collingridge
      Interestingly, the first radiometric dating of rocks was carried out in 1905. The samples were predicted to be 92 to 570 million years old (later found to be 410 million to 2.2 billion years when the methods were refined). By the 1920s it was becoming apparent that the Earth was a few billion years old. However, it wasn't until the early 1930s that geologists began to take radiometric dating seriously.

      Before that, Lord Kelvin's prediction that the Earth was 20 - 40 million years old was generally accepted. This was based on the cooling of the Earth. It wasn't until 1903 that radioactive decay was discovered which later was shown to challenge his calculation since it meant the Earth had an additional heat source he had been unaware of. There were other predictions based on sedimentation rates and salt deposition, which gave predictions between 3 million and 1.6 billion years old.

      There's a good description of the various predictions and there problems here: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/lectures/age_of_the_earth/age_of_the_earth.html
      (The third section compares the different scientific predictions.)
      (1 vote)
  • piceratops sapling style avatar for user talbertdustin
    How big was the biggest Tyrannosaurus rex that ever lived?
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • primosaur sapling style avatar for user Gillian
    Did he ever find the first V-Raptor?
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user
  • duskpin ultimate style avatar for user Olivia
    Who discovered the "Triceratops" and when?
    (1 vote)
    Default Khan Academy avatar avatar for user

Video transcript

>>LOWELL DINGUS: Barnum Brown was, by all accounts, the best dinosaur collector who ever lived. He began his career here at AMNH in 1897 going out on expeditions to the American West first in search of fossil mammals but of course later with the dinosaur expeditions. He started as a field assistant and worked his way up to be curator in the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology, head of all the dinosaur collections. >>MARK NORELL: The majority of specimens that we have on display were collected by him. I mean, he was the one who collected the first Tyrannosaurus Rex specimens. He was the one who collected the Albertosaurus specimens. He was such a popular and important guy during his lifetime that he really, really, really kind of was the museum. >>SPEAKER: Curator Barnum Brown found and brought back many dinosaurs. Here is the head of dreaded Tyrannosaurus. The skeleton of a Pteranodon. >>DINGUS: We'd known for a long time, both Mark and I, that there were 13 boxes of documents and correspondence up in the archives of the Vertebrate Paleontology Department and no one had ever written a comprehensive biography of Barnum before. We felt like, given that it was about a century after his discovery of Tyrannosaurus, it was the right time to celebrate his life. He happened to be born and grow up during the first Bone Rush out into the American West led by Othniel Marsh at Yale and his arch rival E.D. Cope at the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences beginning in the 1870s. >>NORELL: Barnum Brown collected a number of Tyrannosaurus in the Hell Creek Formation in the first decade of the 20th Century. A number of them weren't that complete but they knew that there was this big hypercarnivore which was out there. He found things like, you know, a lower jaw, part of a brain case. Finally he found this specimen, what would become the 5027 Specimen, and the skull, which is still amongst the most beautiful Tyrannosaurus skulls known, was found in one single chert block. >>DINGUS: It was quite a sensation right from the start. From the announcement in the New York Times that they had discovered Tyrannosaurus, there was a full page article about the discovery, and that continued all the way through until they unveiled the mount for the public in the exhibition halls. >>NORELL: He would go out on the road to give lectures and people would flock around his trains when they came. He was one of the sort of early sort of celebrity paleontologists in the sense that he had his own CBS radio show each week which he would talk about things. He was the Dinosaur Consultant for Walt Disney and Shostakovitch for Fantasia. >>DINGUS: I don't think it's too much to say that we all work in his shadow, especially if you're working on dinosaurs. It's not only the fossils that you're probably incorporating into your studies, no matter what kind of dinosaur you're working on, but he was also trained as a geologist at the University of Kansas. And although he didn't take a lot of detailed field notes, he had a very good eye for the stratigraphy, the sequence of rock layers, in the field area where he worked all over the world. No matter how hard you try, especially here at the American Museum, you can never really walk out of Barnum's shadow.