Henry Fairfield Osborn
Encyclopedia
Henry Fairfield Osborn, Sr. ForMemRS (August 8, 1857 – November 6, 1935) was an American geologist
, paleontologist, and eugenicist
.
, 1857, the son of the prominent railroad tycoon William Henry
and Virginia Reed Osborn. A famous distant ancestor through his paternal line was Nathaniel Bowditch
. He studied at Princeton University
(1873-1877) and obtained a B.A.
in geology and archaeology. In 1878 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
. Later he studied embryology
under Thomas Huxley
as well as Francis Maitland Balfour
at Cambridge University, England. In 1880, Osborn obtained a Sc.D.
in paleontology
from Princeton, becoming a Lecturer in Biology and Professor of Comparative Anatomy
from at the same university (1883-1890). In 1891 Osborn was hired jointly by Columbia University
and the American Museum of Natural History
, New York. He became Professor of Biology
at Columbia University
and later became a Professor of zoology
in 1896. He was also elected President for the American Society of Naturalists and later the American Association for the Advancement of Science
made him one of its Vice Presidents (1894-1896). At the museum he succeeded Morris K. Jesup as president in 1908, serving until 1933, during which time he accumulated one of the finest fossil
collections in the world. He assembled a great team of fossil hunters and preparators, which included Roy Chapman Andrews
, a gentleman allegedly a possible inspiration for the creation of the fictional archeologist Indiana Jones
, and Charles R. Knight
, who made murals of dinosaurs in their habitats and sculptures of the living creatures. He was mentored by the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope
, whom he met on a fossil-hunting expedition in Wyoming.
Osborn also joined the US Geological Survey in 1900 and became 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, when he met Cope. In 1901, Osborn was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
. He described and named Ornitholestes
in 1903, Tyrannosaurus rex
in 1905, the Pentaceratops
in 1923, and the Velociraptor
in 1924. In 1929 Osborn was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal
from the National Academy of Sciences
. Osborn did research on Tyrannosaurus brains by cutting open fossilized braincases with a diamond saw. Modern researchers use computed tomography scans and 3D reconstruction software to visualize the interior of dinosaur endocrania without damaging valuable specimens.
One critic called Osborn "a first-rate science administrator and a third-rate scientist." William King Gregory
described him as "A man of the highest ideals and standards as teacher, investigator and citizen; great in leadership and administration, a man of scrupulous honor, or disarming sincerity and fairness, generously giving credit to all who aided him, respecting the principles of academic freedom in his assistants even when they differed sharply from him."
and instead developed his own evolution theory of man's origins called the "Dawn Man Theory". His theory was founded on the discovery of Piltdown Man
(Eanthropus) which was dated to the Late (Upper) Pliocene
. Writing before Piltdown was exposed as a hoax, the Eanthropus or "Dawn Man" Osborn maintained sprung from a common ancestor with the ape
during the Oligocene
period which he believed developed entirely separately during the Miocene (16 million years ago). Therefore Osborn argued that all apes (Simia
) following the pre-Darwinian classification of Linnaeus had evolved entirely parallel to the ancestors of man (homo
). 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 man had never evolved from a lower life form.
, he coined the term "Aristogenesis" for his theory. Osborn
described Aristogenesis as "a creative principle causing the [evolutionary] development towards a certain end". According to Osborn Aristogenesis was a mysterious factor in evolution
, an intelligent agency and creative principle, with the ultimate outcome of evolution being the production of mankind.
}}
}}
was a friend and collaborator of Osborn)
Geologist
A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid and liquid matter that constitutes the Earth as well as the processes and history that has shaped it. Geologists usually engage in studying geology. Geologists, studying more of an applied science than a theoretical one, must approach Geology using...
, paleontologist, and eugenicist
Eugenics
Eugenics is the "applied science or the bio-social movement which advocates the use of practices aimed at improving the genetic composition of a population", usually referring to human populations. The origins of the concept of eugenics began with certain interpretations of Mendelian inheritance,...
.
Early life and career
Osborn was born in Fairfield, ConnecticutFairfield, Connecticut
Fairfield is a town located in Fairfield County, Connecticut, United States. It is bordered by the towns of Bridgeport, Trumbull, Easton, Redding and Westport along the Gold Coast of Connecticut. As of the 2010 census, the town had a population of 59,404...
, 1857, the son of the prominent railroad tycoon William Henry
William H. Osborn
William Henry Osborn was a 19th Century railroad tycoon. Born and educated in Salem, Massachusetts, Osborn became one of the most prominent railroad leaders in the United States....
and Virginia Reed Osborn. A famous distant ancestor through his paternal line was Nathaniel Bowditch
Nathaniel Bowditch
Nathaniel Bowditch was an early American mathematician remembered for his work on ocean navigation. He is often credited as the founder of modern maritime navigation; his book The New American Practical Navigator, first published in 1802, is still carried on board every commissioned U.S...
. He studied at Princeton University
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
(1873-1877) and obtained a B.A.
Bachelor of Arts
A Bachelor of Arts , from the Latin artium baccalaureus, is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate course or program in either the liberal arts, the sciences, or both...
in geology and archaeology. In 1878 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
William H. Welch
William Henry Welch, M.D. was an American physician, pathologist, and medical school administrator. He was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at Johns Hopkins Hospital. William Henry Welch, M.D. (April 8, 1850 - April 30, 1934) was an American physician, pathologist, and medical school...
. Later he studied embryology
Embryology
Embryology is a science which is about the development of an embryo from the fertilization of the ovum to the fetus stage...
under Thomas Huxley
Thomas Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS was an English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution....
as well as Francis Maitland Balfour
Francis Maitland Balfour
Francis Maitland Balfour, known as F. M. Balfour, was a British biologist. He lost his life while attempting the ascent of Mont Blanc...
at Cambridge University, England. In 1880, Osborn obtained a Sc.D.
Doctor of Science
Doctor of Science , usually abbreviated Sc.D., D.Sc., S.D. or Dr.Sc., is an academic research degree awarded in a number of countries throughout the world. In some countries Doctor of Science is the name used for the standard doctorate in the sciences, elsewhere the Sc.D...
in paleontology
Paleontology
Paleontology "old, ancient", ὄν, ὀντ- "being, creature", and λόγος "speech, thought") is the study of prehistoric life. It includes the study of fossils to determine organisms' evolution and interactions with each other and their environments...
from Princeton, becoming a Lecturer in Biology and Professor of Comparative Anatomy
Comparative anatomy
Comparative anatomy is the study of similarities and differences in the anatomy of organisms. It is closely related to evolutionary biology and phylogeny .-Description:...
from at the same university (1883-1890). In 1891 Osborn was hired jointly by Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
and the American Museum of Natural History
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History , located on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City, United States, is one of the largest and most celebrated museums in the world...
, New York. He became Professor of Biology
Biology
Biology is a natural science concerned with the study of life and living organisms, including their structure, function, growth, origin, evolution, distribution, and taxonomy. Biology is a vast subject containing many subdivisions, topics, and disciplines...
at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
and later became a Professor of zoology
Zoology
Zoology |zoölogy]]), is the branch of biology that relates to the animal kingdom, including the structure, embryology, evolution, classification, habits, and distribution of all animals, both living and extinct...
in 1896. He was also elected President for the American Society of Naturalists and later the American Association for the Advancement of Science
American Association for the Advancement of Science
The American Association for the Advancement of Science is an international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific responsibility, and supporting scientific education and science outreach for the...
made him one of its Vice Presidents (1894-1896). At the museum he succeeded Morris K. Jesup as president in 1908, serving until 1933, during which time he accumulated one of the finest fossil
Fossil
Fossils are the preserved remains or traces of animals , plants, and other organisms from the remote past...
collections in the world. He assembled a great team of fossil hunters and preparators, which included Roy Chapman Andrews
Roy Chapman Andrews
Roy Chapman Andrews was an American explorer, adventurer and naturalist who became the director of the American Museum of Natural History. He is primarily known for leading a series of expeditions through the fragmented China of the early 20th century into the Gobi Desert and Mongolia...
, a gentleman allegedly a possible inspiration for the creation of the fictional archeologist Indiana Jones
Indiana Jones
Colonel Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr., Ph.D. is a fictional character and the protagonist of the Indiana Jones franchise. George Lucas and Steven Spielberg created the character in homage to the action heroes of 1930s film serials...
, and Charles R. Knight
Charles R. Knight
Charles Robert Knight was an American artist best known for his influential paintings of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals...
, who made murals of dinosaurs in their habitats and sculptures of the living creatures. He was mentored by the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope
Edward Drinker Cope
Edward Drinker Cope was an American paleontologist and comparative anatomist, as well as a noted herpetologist and ichthyologist. Born to a wealthy Quaker family, Cope distinguished himself as a child prodigy interested in science; he published his first scientific paper at the age of nineteen...
, whom he met on a fossil-hunting expedition in Wyoming.
Osborn also joined the US Geological Survey in 1900 and became senior vertebrate paleontologist in 1924. He led many fossil-hunting expeditions into the American Southwest, starting with his first to Colorado
Colorado
Colorado is a U.S. state that encompasses much of the Rocky Mountains as well as the northeastern portion of the Colorado Plateau and the western edge of the Great Plains...
and Wyoming
Wyoming
Wyoming is a state in the mountain region of the Western United States. The western two thirds of the state is covered mostly with the mountain ranges and rangelands in the foothills of the Eastern Rocky Mountains, while the eastern third of the state is high elevation prairie known as the High...
in 1877, when he met Cope. In 1901, Osborn was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
. He described and named Ornitholestes
Ornitholestes
Ornitholestes was a small theropod dinosaur of the late Jurassic of Western Laurasia . To date, it is known only from a single partial skeleton, and badly crushed skull found at the Bone Cabin Quarry near Medicine Bow, Wyoming, in 1900...
in 1903, Tyrannosaurus rex
Tyrannosaurus
Tyrannosaurus meaning "tyrant," and sauros meaning "lizard") is a genus of coelurosaurian theropod dinosaur. The species Tyrannosaurus rex , commonly abbreviated to T. rex, is a fixture in popular culture. It lived throughout what is now western North America, with a much wider range than other...
in 1905, the Pentaceratops
Pentaceratops
Pentaceratops is a genus of ceratopsid dinosaur from the late Cretaceous Period of what is now North America. The appearance of Pentaceratops sternbergii in the fossil record marks the end of the Judithian land vertebrate age and the start of the Kirtlandian...
in 1923, and the Velociraptor
Velociraptor
Velociraptor is a genus of dromaeosaurid theropod dinosaur that existed approximately 75 to 71 million years ago during the later part of the Cretaceous Period. Two species are currently recognized, although others have been assigned in the past. The type species is V. mongoliensis; fossils...
in 1924. In 1929 Osborn was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal
Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal
The Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal is awarded by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences "for meritorious work in zoology or paleontology published in a three- to five-year period." Named after Daniel Giraud Elliot, it was first awarded in 1917....
from the National Academy of Sciences
United States National Academy of Sciences
The National Academy of Sciences is a corporation in the United States whose members serve pro bono as "advisers to the nation on science, engineering, and medicine." As a national academy, new members of the organization are elected annually by current members, based on their distinguished and...
. Osborn did research on Tyrannosaurus brains by cutting open fossilized braincases with a diamond saw. Modern researchers use computed tomography scans and 3D reconstruction software to visualize the interior of dinosaur endocrania without damaging valuable specimens.
One critic called Osborn "a first-rate science administrator and a third-rate scientist." William King Gregory
William King Gregory
William King Gregory was an American zoologist, renowned as a primatologist, paleontologist, and functional and comparative morphologist. He was an expert on mammalian dentition, and a leading contributor to theories of evolution...
described him as "A man of the highest ideals and standards as teacher, investigator and citizen; great in leadership and administration, a man of scrupulous honor, or disarming sincerity and fairness, generously giving credit to all who aided him, respecting the principles of academic freedom in his assistants even when they differed sharply from him."
Dawn Man Theory
Osborn was a critic of DarwinismDarwinism
Darwinism is a set of movements and concepts related to ideas of transmutation of species or of evolution, including some ideas with no connection to the work of Charles Darwin....
and instead developed his own evolution theory of man's origins called the "Dawn Man Theory". His theory was founded on the discovery of Piltdown Man
Piltdown Man
The Piltdown Man was a hoax in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. These fragments consisted of parts of a skull and jawbone, said to have been collected in 1912 from a gravel pit at Piltdown, East Sussex, England...
(Eanthropus) which was dated to the Late (Upper) Pliocene
Pliocene
The Pliocene Epoch is the period in the geologic timescale that extends from 5.332 million to 2.588 million years before present. It is the second and youngest epoch of the Neogene Period in the Cenozoic Era. The Pliocene follows the Miocene Epoch and is followed by the Pleistocene Epoch...
. Writing before Piltdown was exposed as a hoax, the Eanthropus or "Dawn Man" Osborn maintained sprung from a common ancestor with the ape
Ape
Apes are Old World anthropoid mammals, more specifically a clade of tailless catarrhine primates, belonging to the biological superfamily Hominoidea. The apes are native to Africa and South-east Asia, although in relatively recent times humans have spread all over the world...
during the Oligocene
Oligocene
The Oligocene is a geologic epoch of the Paleogene Period and extends from about 34 million to 23 million years before the present . As with other older geologic periods, the rock beds that define the period are well identified but the exact dates of the start and end of the period are slightly...
period which he believed developed entirely separately during the Miocene (16 million years ago). Therefore Osborn argued that all apes (Simia
Simia
In his Systema Naturae of 1758, Carolus Linnaeus divided the Order Primates into four genera: Homo, Simia, Lemur, and Vespertilio. His Vespertilio included all bats, and has since been moved from Primates to Chiroptera...
) following the pre-Darwinian classification of Linnaeus had evolved entirely parallel to the ancestors of man (homo
Homo
Homo may refer to:*the Greek prefix ὅμο-, meaning "the same"*the Latin for man, human being*Homo, the taxonomical genus including modern humans...
). 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 man had never evolved from a lower life form.
Aristogenesis
Osborn was a believer in OrthogenesisOrthogenesis
Orthogenesis, orthogenetic evolution, progressive evolution or autogenesis, is the hypothesis that life has an innate tendency to evolve in a unilinear fashion due to some internal or external "driving force". The hypothesis is based on essentialism and cosmic teleology and proposes an intrinsic...
, he coined the term "Aristogenesis" for his theory. Osborn
described Aristogenesis as "a creative principle causing the [evolutionary] development towards a certain end". According to Osborn Aristogenesis was a mysterious factor in evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
, an intelligent agency and creative principle, with the ultimate outcome of evolution being the production of mankind.
Published Books
- The Origin and Evolution of Life (1916)
- Men of the Old Stone Age (1916)
- The Age of Mammals in Europe, Asia and North America (1921)
- Evolution and Religion (1923)
- Man Rises to Parnassus', Critical Epochs in the Pre-History of Man (1927)
- From the Greeks to Darwin: an outline of the development of the evolution idea (1927)
- Aristogenesis, the creative principle in the origin of species (1934)
Works cited
}}}}
- Larsson, H.C.E., 2001. Endocranial Anatomy of Carcharodontosaurus saharicus. In D.H. Tanke & K. Carpenter (eds.), Mesozoic Vertebrate Life: pp. 19–33.
}}
Further reading
(Madison GrantMadison Grant
Madison Grant was an American lawyer, historian and physical anthropologist, known primarily for his work as a eugenicist and conservationist...
was a friend and collaborator of Osborn)