The Fossil Vertebrate Collection began with specimens acquired by the Museum through the purchase of the Wards Natural Science Establishment exhibit at the Columbian Exposition of the 1894 World’s Fair.
In 1898 the new Department of Geology hired its first paleontologist, Elmer Riggs, whose research focused on fossil mammals. At the beginning of his tenure at the museum Riggs conducted fieldwork in the American West focusing on collecting and studying dinosaurs to give the new museum’s displays a jump-start. Among his discoveries was Brachiosaurus, which held the record as the largest known dinosaur for many decades.
Riggs spend the remainder of his career working on fossil mammals. He built a great collection through the collecting expeditions he led. One of the premier collections he amassed came from nearly five years spent during two separate expeditions to Argentina and Bolivia in the 1920s. This collection continues to attract researchers from all over the world.
Bryan Patterson joined Riggs in the 1930s. For the next 20 years he was a prolific collector and researcher of fossil mammals, eventually leaving the museum to finish out his career at Harvard. Highlights of Patterson’s tenure include work in the Paleocene and Eocene of the western US, primarily Colorado, and also his work in the Early Cretaceous Trinity Formation in Texas.
Succeeding Patterson was Bill Turnbull who rose from preparator to Curator in the mid-1950s and spent decades collecting in the Eocene rocks of the Washakie Basin in Wyoming. With his lifelong collaborator, Ernie Lundelius at the University of Texas, Bill spent many seasons collecting fossil mammals in Quaternary cave deposits of Australia.
In the early 1980s John Flynn succeeded Bill Turnbull and joined him collecting in the Washakie Basin until 1996. John also had active research and collecting interests in the Tertiary of South America particularly Chile, and in the Triassic and Jurassic of Madagascar.
In 2007 Ken Angielczyk succeeded John Flynn and began a very active overseas collecting program, including South America and Africa, focusing in the latter on Karoo-style basins. Ken studies nonmammalian synapsids, a group which used to be considered a type of reptile. Because of this history, this collection has always been part of the Fossil Reptile Collection.
In addition to dinosaur specimens added around the turn of the last century, notable expansions of the amphibian and reptile collection occurred shortly after World War II with accession of many Permian vertebrates from the Walker Museum Collections and through the fieldwork of department curators such as Rainer Zangerl.
John Bolt’s research on early tetrapods and Olivier Rieppel’s research on the origins and relationships of major extant groups of reptiles such as snakes and turtles placed the museum at the forefront of current paleoherpetology.
Lance Grande, Curator of Fossil Fishes, has added important new fossil amphibians and reptiles from the Green River Formation of Wyoming to the collection.
Following a six decade hiatus in dinosaur research, the museum’s acquisition of T. rex SUE (FMNH PR 2081) led to a renewed interest in dinosaur paleontology and the hire of Peter Makovicky as Curator of Dinosaurs. Pete’s work in the Cretaceous of Montana, Wyoming and Utah has added important new dinosaur material to the collection.
The Fossil Fish Collection also received specimens from the transfer of the University of Chicago’s Walker Museum collection in 1947. Fossil Fishes was expanded though collecting parties led by Robert Denison in the late 1940s through the mid-1960s, by Rainier Zangerl in the 1950s to the 1970s, and later by Lance Grande from the mid-1980s to the present. Denison worked in Paleozoic rocks with a primary focus on the Devonian. He worked in the Western US, Canada, and in Europe. Rainier Zangerl focused on fishes from the Pennsylvanian black shales of Illinois and Indiana. Lance Grande’s fieldwork has been primarily in the Eocene Green River Formation of Wyoming. He has also worked in the Cretaceous of Mexico.
The Field Columbian Exposition include an assemblage of large fossil moas from the Ice Age of New Zealand including a mounted skeleton. In the 1910s, a consortium of benefactors arranged for Field Museum to get a collection of Ice Age fossils from the tar pits at La Brea. This collection included mostly carnivorous species as is typical of the La Brea fauna. Raptors and scavengers were attracted to all the dead and soon-to-be dead animals trapped in the tar. Another La Brea collection came to us from the Northwestern Dental School in the mid-1950s. In all, our tar pit collection includes almost 150 bird fossils.
A very interesting and rare collection was made by archaeologists from the Oriental Institute working in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey. The Braidwood Expeditions from the mid-1960s collected not only archaeological artifacts, but bone fragments from animals being kept and/or eaten by the early peoples of each site. This latter assemblage, a "zooarchaelogical collection" came to the Field Museum and though it mostly represents bones from mammals, there are birds in the collection as well.
Some very important Cretaceous birds from Madagascar have been collected by field parties of Stony Brook University in New York, led by Dave Krause. Through a collaborative project between Stony Brook and Field Museum some of these fossils have been deposited in our Fossil Bird Collection.
One of the most striking collections of fossil birds has been amassed through the efforts of Lance Grande and his teams working in the Eocene Green River Formation of Wyoming. Lance is quarrying primarily for fossil fish, but once every few years a fossil bird is found. Because fossils from the Green River Formation are often complete, many of the Green River birds are spectacular. A couple even include fossilized feathers!