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About Barnum Brown:
Named after, but not related to, P.T. Barnum (of traveling circus fame), Barnum Brown had a flamboyant personality to match. For much of his long life, Brown was the chief fossil hunter for The American Museum of Natural History in New York, and he participated in a huge number of digs, including one that unearthed the very first T. Rex skeleton (Brown, unfortunately, didn’t get to name his find; that honor went to museum president Henry Osborn).
Despite the large number of fossil finds to his credit, Brown is remembered more as an energetic, tireless, well-traveled digger than as a published paleontologist (though he did write some influential papers). His techniques seem to have matched his personality: in the early 20th century, his preferred method for finding fossils was to blow up huge tracts of land with dynamite, scour the rubble for bones, and cart the resulting finds back to base camp on horse-drawn carriages.
