Event details
Oct
7
Expeditions to Patagonia: 150 Years of Princeton Paleontology
150 Years of Princeton Paleontology brings real fossils from the University’s Geosciences collection, alongside the publications describing them, to tell the story of the scientific lineage that founded modern vertebrate paleontology.
October 7: Expeditions to Patagonia
Paleontology is not possible without fossils, or the people who venture out to find and collect them. The genesis of paleontology at Princeton in the 1870s was sparked and fueled by two decades of field expeditions by its founders, and established the small New Jersey school as a national scientific force. But a seismic shift occurred in the early 1890s when Princeton welcomed in the greatest fossil collector of all time. While John Bell Hatcher spent the 1880s and early 1890s in the American West, discovering the first skulls of Triceratops and the first skeletons of T. rex, on behalf of the notorious O.C. Marsh, he was already setting his collecting sights much father afield. Disruptions in field funding would drive Hatcher away from Yale and to Princeton, where his collecting prowess was granted new autonomy. Ever the insightful field paleontologist, Hatcher fixated upon a faraway land visited by few others, but where the great naturalist Charles Darwin had decades before found fossils of animals much different from those of North America, providing tantalizing clues of prehistoric ecosystems yet to be uncovered. Years away from home, routine brushes with death, and many magnificent discoveries later, John Bell Hatcher, aided only by his brother-in-law, would hand the science of vertebrate paleontology its greatest sample of fossils from an endemic lost world, and the Princeton expeditions to Patagonia would become one of the greatest field paleontology sagas of all time.
Join us for the other events in this series:
September 9: The Paleo Ponies of Princeton
November 4: The Other 2/3 of the Tree of Life: Invertebrate and Plant Fossils
December 2: The Cretaceous World of Egg Mountain
October 7: Expeditions to Patagonia
Paleontology is not possible without fossils, or the people who venture out to find and collect them. The genesis of paleontology at Princeton in the 1870s was sparked and fueled by two decades of field expeditions by its founders, and established the small New Jersey school as a national scientific force. But a seismic shift occurred in the early 1890s when Princeton welcomed in the greatest fossil collector of all time. While John Bell Hatcher spent the 1880s and early 1890s in the American West, discovering the first skulls of Triceratops and the first skeletons of T. rex, on behalf of the notorious O.C. Marsh, he was already setting his collecting sights much father afield. Disruptions in field funding would drive Hatcher away from Yale and to Princeton, where his collecting prowess was granted new autonomy. Ever the insightful field paleontologist, Hatcher fixated upon a faraway land visited by few others, but where the great naturalist Charles Darwin had decades before found fossils of animals much different from those of North America, providing tantalizing clues of prehistoric ecosystems yet to be uncovered. Years away from home, routine brushes with death, and many magnificent discoveries later, John Bell Hatcher, aided only by his brother-in-law, would hand the science of vertebrate paleontology its greatest sample of fossils from an endemic lost world, and the Princeton expeditions to Patagonia would become one of the greatest field paleontology sagas of all time.
Join us for the other events in this series:
September 9: The Paleo Ponies of Princeton
November 4: The Other 2/3 of the Tree of Life: Invertebrate and Plant Fossils
December 2: The Cretaceous World of Egg Mountain
University programs and activities are open to all eligible participants without regard to identity or other protected characteristics. Sponsorship of an event does not constitute institutional endorsement of external speakers or views presented.
View physical accessibility information for campus buildings and find routes and entrances using the interactive campus map.