Roland Thaxter Bird (December 29, 1899 – January 24, 1978) was an American palaeontologist. He is best known for his discovery of fossil trackways of the Paluxy River in Texas,[1] and work with the American Museum of Natural History.[2]

Early life

Bird was born on December 29, 1899, in Rye, New York. When he was 14, a respiratory condition forced him to drop out of high school, and after his mother died from tuberculosis, he was advised by a doctor to move to his uncle's farm.[3] In the 1920s and 1930s, he struggled financially due to the Great Depression and traveling throughout the United States on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle working odd jobs, including as a cowboy in Florida.

Paleontology career

Bird discovered his first fossil, the skull of an amphibian, in 1932 while camping in the Petrified Forest National Park area. He sent the skull to his father, an amateur entomologist, who passed it along to Barnum Brown, then a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. The specimen was a previously undiscovered genus and species, which would later be named Stanocephalosaurus birdi, and the discovery led to Bird's employment at the Museum in 1934, where he worked as a fossil collector for Brown. Bird first learned of possible dinosaur tracks in the area of Glen Rose, Texas, in 1938 from locals in Gallup New Mexico,[4][5] and in 1940 he worked alongside crews from the Works Progress Administration to excavate dozens of sauropod and theropod tracks from the Paluxy River Basin.[5][6] Parts of the excavated trackway were sent to the Texas Memorial Museum, as well as the AMNH.[7]

Additional reading

Bones for Barnum Brown: Adventures of a Dinosaur Hunter, by R.T. Bird

References

  1. ↑ Branch, G. (2006). Paluxy Footprints. In H. J. Birx (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Anthropology (Vol. 4, p. 1818). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference.
  2. ↑ Bird, Roland T. (February 1941). "A Dinosaur Walks into the Museum".
  3. ↑ Thomas, Mark (December 17, 2015). "ROLAND T. BIRD - PALEONTOLOGIST". Mark Thomas - Geology Blog.
  4. ↑ "Dinosaur Valley State Park History — Texas Parks & Wildlife Department". tpwd.texas.gov. Retrieved 2021-01-29.
  5. 1 2 Black, Riley (March 12, 2012). "Excavating the River of Giants". Smithsonian Magazine. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
  6. ↑ Neufeld, Berney (June 1, 1975). "Dinosaur Tracks and Giant Men". Geoscience Research Institute. Retrieved October 10, 2023.
  7. ↑ Falkingham, Peter L.; Bates, Karl T.; Farlow, James O. (April 2, 2014). "Historical Photogrammetry: Bird's Paluxy River Dinosaur Chase Sequence Digitally Reconstructed as It Was prior to Excavation 70 Years Ago". PLOS ONE. 9 (4).


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