Barnum Brown (February 12, 1873 – February 5, 1963), commonly referred to as Mr. Bones, was an American paleontologist. He discovered the first documented remains of Tyrannosaurus during a career that made him one of the most famous fossil hunters working from the late Victorian era into the early 20th century.
Family and early life
Barnum Brown was born in Carbondale, Kansas on February 12, 1873 to William and Clara Silver Brown. Brown's parents moved to Kansas in 1859, traveling by covered wagon with their daughter, Melissa. Their second daughter, Alice Elizabeth, was born in 1860 in Osage County, Kansas, where the family would build a one-room cabin on top of a coal seam. In 1867, the Browns gave birth to their first son, Frank, who, in a few years, would be the one to suggest P.T. Barnum as a namesake for his little brother.
As a young boy, Brown helped with household chores around the farm and began his first fossil collection while following the stripping plow, which unearthed fossil corals and Native American arrowheads. Upon returning from the trip in the fall, Brown began attending high school in Lawrence, then matriculated at the University of Kansas in 1893.
University of Kansas
After graduating from high school, Brown attended the University of Kansas and took an early interest in archaeology and paleontology. In early 1897, Osborn offered Brown a job as an assistant curator at the AMNH as well as a scholarship for graduate work at Columbia University.
Sponsored by the AMNH, Brown traversed the country bargaining and trading for fossils. His field was not limited to dinosaurs. He was known to collect or obtain anything of possible scientific value. Often, he simply sent money to have fossils shipped to the AMNH, and any new specimen of interest often resulted in a flurry of letters between the discoverer and Brown. With respect to nomenclature, Brown often named fossils after people or events that were relevant to his life at the time of discovery.
thumb|left|Brown (left) with [[Henry Fairfield Osborn and the leg bone of Diplodocus specimen AMNH 223]]
Brown worked a handful of years in Como Bluff, Wyoming for AMNH in the late 1890s, discovering a prominent Diplodocus specimen and introducing new jacketing and collecting procedures. In 1910, Brown was promoted to Associate Curator in the Vertebrate Paleontology Department at the AMNH.
Brown conducted his last formal field work season at the age of 83, when he returned to the Claggett Shale in Montana in 1955, where he collected a plesiosaur skeleton. He was a member of Sigma Xi and the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, as well as a fellow of the Geological Society of America, the Royal Geographical Society, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, the New York Academy of Sciences, and the Paleontological Society.
Public persona
Brown lived at the tail end of an unprecedented age of scientific discovery, and was one of its more colorful practitioners. At dig sites in Canada, Brown was frequently photographed wearing a large fur coat.
thumb|300x300px|Barnum Brown conducting field work in a fur coat in Montana, 1914.
During World War I and World War II, he worked as an "intelligence asset" for the Office of Strategic Services and the Bureau of Economic Warfare. During his many trips abroad, he was not above picking up spare cash acting as a corporate spy for oil companies. Sinclair Oil funded many of Brown's expeditions and research, particularly during the Great Depression, and the company continues to use Diplodocus, discovered by Brown, as its logo.
Personal life and death
On February 13, 1904, Brown married school teacher Marion Raymond in Oxford, New York. She accompanied him on several expeditions, including the 1905 trip to the Hell Creek Formation during which Brown discovered two additional Tyrannosaurus rex specimens.
In early February of 1963, Brown slipped into a sudden coma and died on February 5. Brown was buried in River View Cemetery in Oxford, New York, the hometown of his first wife, Marion Raymond.