150 Years of Princeton Paleontology brings real fossils from the University’s Geosciences collection, alongside the scientific publications describing them, to tell the story of the scientific lineage that founded modern vertebrate paleontology.

On a hot June day in 1876, three Princeton undergraduates were avoiding studying for their final examinations by swimming in the canals south of campus. At some point in the leisurely afternoon, one of the students casually told his friends that he had been reading an old Harper's magazine article recounting a Yale fossil hunting expedition out West, and he asked his friends "Why can't we get up something like that?" To his surprise, they heartily endorsed the proposition. None of them could have imagined that such an off-handed comment would fundamentally alter the course of the burgeoning study of paleontology. 150 years after Princeton Paleontology was first conceived that early summer afternoon, we can fully appreciate the magnitude of that moment.

Paleontology is the study of the 99.999% of life on Earth which is now extinct. When William Berryman Scott '77 inadvertently founded Princeton's century-long dynasty in fossil studies, he thrust his friends and himself quite literally into the middle of a scientific field battling to define itself. With the famed "Bone Wars" raging between Yale's Othniel Charles Marsh and Philadelphia's Edward Drinker Cope, North American paleontology was less of a rigorous discipline, and more of a rabid, animosity-driven rush to name more species and claim more territory. But if the science would ever evolve to ideas and theory, it would need successors who would eventually take the reigns from Cope and Marsh. Princeton would provide those successors.

Those Princeton students would make good on their plans to explore the West for fossils, and the science that countless millions of people have marveled at over the last century and a half in museums and classrooms around the world, including some of the most iconic species resurrected from Earth's prehistory, would come to be delivered by a lineage of scientists working from a small powerhouse school in central New Jersey. This is the story of that dynasty's founding and first decades in the life of Princeton Paleontology. 

Photo of Henry Osborn, Francis Speir, and William Scott from the National Park Service https://www.nps.gov/flfo/learn/historyculture/henry-fairfield-osborn.htm