Elmer S. Riggs

Elmer Samuel Riggs ( born January 23, 1869 in Trafalgar, Indiana, † March 25 1963 in Sedan, Kansas) was an American paleontologist.

Life

Riggs grew up in Kansas and studied at the University of Kansas. Then he was at the American Museum of Natural History, and from 1898 at the Field Museum of Natural History (then Field Columbian Museum ) in Chicago. He began excavations for the Museum in the Morrison Formation in Wyoming and Colorado and dug there in 1900 at Fruita in Colorado the first known skeleton of Brachiosaurus altithorax from and a year later in 1901 a skeleton of Apatosaurus, which also later to the attractions of the Field Museum belonged. He was curator at the Field Museum, where he retired in 1942, but still far led by old age retirement guides.

He was the discoverer and describer of Brachiosaurus and found evidence that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus represent the same genus, which prevailed later. He also represented early the view that the large sauropods were rural dwellers and did not live in lakes or rivers, as has been widely assumed until the 1970s, until again prevailed the view with Robert Bakker and others that they were rural residents.

Later he focused on fossil mammals, which he dug up in the U.S. and South America until the early 1930s. He described, among other things belonging to the marsupials equipped with saber teeth predatory Thylacosmilus from the Pliocene of Argentina.

He was since 1952 Honorary Member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.