John Bell Hatcher

John Bell Hatcher ( born October 11, 1861 in Cooperstown (Illinois ); † July 3, 1904 in Pittsburgh) was an American paleontologist.

He grew up in Cooper in Iowa on, earned the money for study as a miner in the coal mining and studied from 1880 from Grinnell College, and from 1881 at Yale University (Sheffield Scientific School) with the conclusion of 1884. Afterwards, he was an assistant with the paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh and collected for these fossils in the western United States. First was from Marsh as an assistant paleontologist Charles H. Sternberg assigned, but was soon working on it independently in Kansas, in the Permian of Texas and from 1886 to 1888 in the Oligocene of Nebraska and South Dakota, where he more than seven tons of fossils Titanotherium to the Peabody Museum sent. In 1889 he was present at Lusk (Wyoming) a fossil skeleton of the Torosaurus, and the skulls of 33 further Ceratopsiern in the next four years. He was dissatisfied with his job at Marsh (assistants were not allowed to publish there, and the first description of Torosaurus Marsh took over ).

He negotiated inconclusively in 1890 with Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History, and went in 1893 to Princeton University as a curator of Vertebrate Paleontology and assistant in geology. He collected first in the Oligocene of South Dakota, Miocene and Pleistocene of Nebraska and in the Cretaceous of Wyoming. 1896 to 1899 he undertook expeditions to excavations to Patagonia. He organized the largely self- financing and returned with numerous fossils of mammals from the Miocene. He was accompanied by paleontologists Olaf Peterson, with whom he was related. With financial help from Andrew Carnegie, he published several volumes of monographs on the expedition. From the similarity of the fossil fauna he developed the hypothesis that South America, Australia and Antarctica earlier formed a land mass of and wanted to test this in the Antarctic, for which it was not realized anymore.

In 1900 he was curator of paleontology and osteology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. He was responsible for the investigation and establishment of a Diplodocus skeleton and published in 1901 a monograph on this ( he named the species Diplodocus carnegii after the sponsor of the Museum Andrew Carnegie ). He also oversaw the reconstruction of specimens to London ( 1905) and Berlin went. Before his death from typhoid fever, he worked on the completion of a monograph on Ceratopsia that Marsh had begun - it was finished in 1907 by Richard Swann Lull.

He is the discoverer and describer of Teleoceras.

He was married in 1887 and had four children. His grave in Pittsburgh was originally unmarked, but this was corrected in 1995 ( with a Torosaurus image on the grave stone).