Charles Hazelius Sternberg
Charles Hazelius Sternberg (* June 15, 1850 in Cooperstown, New York, † July 20, 1943 ) was one of America's most successful fossil collectors of the 19th and early 20th century ( dinosaurs, tertiary mammals).
Life
Sternberg grew up in Cooperstown. His father Levi Sternberg was pastor at Hartwick seminary. He worked from 1867 with his twin brother on the ranch of his older brother George M. Sternberg ( 1838-1915 ), a military surgeon with the rank of brigadier general and bacteriologist ( the fossils collected ), in Ellsworth County, Kansas, and collected incidentally fossils in the near Cretaceous Dakota sandstone formations. He sent plant fossils to the Smithsonian in Washington and so came into contact with the palaeobotanist Leo Lesquereux, who collected in 1872 in his residential area and a plant ( Protophyllum Sternbergii ) named after him. 1875/76 he studied briefly at the Kansas State Agricultural College, the forerunner of the University of Kansas, but did not graduate. From 1876, he gained a full- fossils for the famous paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope [note 1], among others, in Wyoming, Texas, Montana, Oregon and Washington, both dinosaurs and mammals of the Tertiary. Cope named a fossil camel according to Sternberg ( Paratylopus Sternbergi ). He also collected for its own account for Copes competitors Marsh and for other museums such as the Museum of Comparative Anatomy at Harvard from 1882 in the Permian of Texas ( where he discovered fossils of Dimetrodon and Eryops ). In 1912 he moved with his sons Charles M. Sternberg, George F. Sternberg ( 1883-1969 ) and Levi Sternberg ( 1894-1976 ), which were all known dinosaur excavator, to Canada, where he developed the rich dinosaur sites in Alberta. He was co-founder of the Calgary Zoo, known for dinosaur exhibits.
He found, among others, in 1908 with his sons in Lusk, Wyoming a (then so called ) Trachodon [note 2] ( Edmontosaurus annectens ) skeleton with skin parts ( Trachodon mummy, mummy Trachodon ), now in the American Museum of Natural History ( thanks to Henry Fairfield Osborn, who described it in 1912 ).
Osborn named Pentaceratops Sternbergii according to Sternberg.
He was married to Anna Reynolds since 1880 and had three sons. Two of the sons remained in Canada ( Charles M. Sternberg at the National Museum in Ottawa and Levi at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto ), George F. Sternberg went back to Kansas and was from 1933 to 1955 curator at the Museum of Fort Hays State University ( FHSU ) (today's Sternberg Museum of Natural History ). He found, among other things, a known fossil of a fish with another fish in the digestive system ( Xiphactinus with Gillicus arcuatus in the stomach).
Charles H. Sternberg was deeply religious, and wrote and published poetry.
Works
- The life of a fossil hunter. H. Holt, New York, 1909 doi: 10.5962/bhl.title.22334
- Hunting dinosaurs in the bad lands of the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada. Lawrence 1917 doi: 10.5962/bhl.title.33205 doi: 10.5962/bhl.title.57209