Word: othniel
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...fall of 1884, when he heard that dinosaur remains had been discovered in a stone quarry near Manchester, Conn., Yale University's Othniel Charles Marsh, a pioneering paleontologist, rushed off to see for himself. Sure enough, there were the fossilized bones of a small (7-ft.-long) creature that was later identified as Ammosaurus major, an inhabitant of the area 200 million years ago. But Marsh was already too late. The dinosaur's front half had already been carted away; the brownstone in which the fossils were encased had been cut into blocks and cemented into...
...Peabody's founders have long since been exceeded; they appear modest purposes indeed, set against the multifarious activities of the Museum today. Curiously enough he initial idea for the foundation of the institution, one of the first of its kind in America came in 1805 from a Yale graduate, Othniel Charles Marsh. The science of anthropology was then in its relative infancy and Marsh, later to become America's first professor of paleontology, was little more than a novice in the field. But while digging one day in an ancient Indian mound in Ohio, Marsh was struck by the realization...
Fortunately or unfortunately, as the case may be, the history of the Peabody dates back to an idea conceived by a Yale man. In 1856 Professor Othniel C. Marsh, impressed by his discoveries in an insignificant, little shell-heap in Newark, New Jersey, wrote to his uncle, George Peabody of London, that he felt it might be a good idea if a museum of American archacology and rthnology were established in this country. Peabody, having already intended to give something to Harvard, gathered in the suggestion with open arms, the result being that on October 16, 1866, a deed...
Most of the Marshes went to Harvard: Othniel Charles Marsh went to Yale. There he became the first U. S. professor of paleontology. For Yale he wheedled from his uncle, crusty Financier-Philanthropist George Peabody, some $200,000 for the Peabody Museum of Natural History. For the Museum he assembled the largest collection of fossil vertebrates of his day, including the completely reconstructed skeletons of twelve dinosaurs, one pterodactyl. On his fossil hunts in the Wild West he dis covered that U. S. dinosaurs sometimes weighed 40 tons, that cretaceous birds had teeth, that cretaceous seas contained sea serpents...