John Bell Hatcher
(October 11, 1861 – July 3, 1904)
Raised but not born in Iowa, John Bell Hatcher was brought up mainly by his father. It was through him that he received much of his early education, being combined with agricultural work on the family farm. After moving through public schools he started his college education in Iowa before moving onto Yale to complete a degree in Philosophy. It was here that he came to the eye of Othniel Marsh, after showing his fossil collection to him. Marsh immediately picked up on John’s natural talent as a fossil collector. Soon after completing his degree, he began working for Marsh, and established himself as one of the greatest dinosaur hunters of all time, being referred to as the ‘King of Collectors’ by none other than Marsh himself.
Fossil Discoveries
Fresh out of university, Hatcher was sent to all over the US on digs by Marsh. At first he was an assistant in the field, but it did not take long before he was more than capable to go out and excavate on his own, which is where his passion lay.
In 1888 Hatcher was sent to Wyoming, to discover the origins of some peculiar fossils horns that Marsh had been sent. Since he was originally sent, till he left four years later, Hatcher managed to find 33 ceratopsian skulls, and the remains of 17 other individuals, much to the annoyance of Edward Cope, who had been in possession of fragments of ceratops for a while, but had been unable to identify them. This was later described as the Triceratops, which even though not named by him, would be Hatchers most famous find. Figure 1 shows the reconstruction of numerous individuals of Triceratops, into one individual, all the bones were collected by Hatcher.
Hatcher became annoyed at Yale however, with Marsh’s refusal to let assistant write papers, and eventually left in 1893 to work as curator of vertebrate palaeontology at Princeton University.
It was while he was at Princeton that Hatcher devised and completed his famous Patagonian expeditions. These expeditions lead to the discovery of many Miocene mammals, his findings, instead of being publishing in scientific papers were rather the subject of numerous reports.
In 1900 he moved again, to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, being appointed the Curator of Palaeontology and Osteology. Here he carried on valuable work, such as the helping of the creation and casting of the now famous Diplodocus carnegii that is found in the British museum.
Unfortunately Hatcher died at the age of 42 of Typhoid in 1904, whilst completing the monograph on Ceratopsia, that Marsh had started, and Lull went onto finish. During his life he only published 48 papers, due to his time at Yale, and his inability to publish whilst there.
References and Further Reading
John Bell Hatcher:
Hatcher. J, B, Bone Hunters in Patagonia: Narrative of the Expedition (1903.
Diplodocus Marsh, by J.B. Hatcher 1901, Its Osteology, Taxonomy, and Probable Habits, with a Restoration of the Skeleton. Memoirs of the Carnegie Museum, Volume 1, Number 1, 1901.
Marsh. O, C. Hatcher. J, B. Lull. R, S. Monograph of all known ceratopsians (1907)
Osborn, H, F. Hatcher, J. B. The four phyla of Oligocene titanotheres. Bulletin of the AMNH ; v. 16, article 8. (1902)
Brown, B; Hatcher, J. B. 3 A new species of fossil edentate from the Santa Cruz Formation of Patagonia. Bulletin of the AMNH ; v. 19, article 11. (1903)
Allen, J. A.; Hatcher, J, B. Descriptions of new rodents from southern Patagonia ; with, A note on the genus Euneomys Coues ; and, An addendum to article IV, on Siberian mammals. Bulletin of the AMNH ; v. 19, article 5. (1903)
URLs
http://www.yale.edu/peabody/archives/ypmbios/hatcher.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Bell_Hatcher
http://homepages.rootsweb.com/~nhatcher/hatjbell.htm
http://digitallibrary.amnh.org/dspace/handle/2246/7//items-by-author?author=Hatcher%2C+J.+B.+(John+Bell)%2C+1861-1904.
http://www.nmnh.si.edu/paleo/dino/tricera1.htm
Figure 1: The first Triceratops to go on display and is from the Smithsonian Institute of Natural History.