R. S. Lull
Richard Swann Lull, cited as RS Lull, ( born November 6, 1867 in Annapolis, † 1957) was an American vertebrate paleontologist.
Lull was the son of a naval officer, and his mother Elizabeth Burton was the daughter of General Henry Stanton Burton. Lull was short-sighted and could not therefore pursue the military career of his ancestors. He studied zoology at Rutgers College with a master's degree 1896. 1918 he received an honorary doctorate. Lull worked briefly as an entomologist for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1894 assistant professor and later associate professor of zoology at the State Agricultural College in Amherst ( Massachusetts). There was a collection of fossil dinosaur tracks from the Red Bed of the Connecticut River valley, which brought him to paleontology.
In 1899 he was involved in the excavation of the American Museum of Natural History in the Jurassic Bone Cabin Quarry in Wyoming ( Laramie north ) involved ( led by Henry Fairfield Osborn ), which was discovered in 1897 by Walter W. Granger and where many skeletons of the museum ( like a Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus and Allosaurus ) were found. There was excavated in 1898 and 1905. From 1902 he has been involved in excavations of the museum in Montana.
In 1903 he received his doctorate at Columbia University in Osborn, was back in Amherst and in 1906 assistant professor of vertebrate paleontology at Yale University and Associate Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History of the museum. 1922 until his retirement in 1936 he was its director. In his time, the move of the museum ( never even met the Lull because it died in 1894 ) coincided with the mounting of some of the big dinosaur skeletons from the collection of Othniel Charles Marsh in the Great Hall. Lull was a popular teacher at Yale. At excavations, he took part in Yale hardly, in his words, you could make the best excavations in the magazines of the Peabody.
In 1933, he received the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences. In 1951 he became an honorary member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
He was ( as well as other former paleontologist ) followers of a Darwinian alternative to the theory of evolution, which also sudden jumps in species formation postulated ( orthogenesis ). As an example, he cited the antlers of elk Megaloceros giganteus (Irish Elk ).
He named 1906 Proceratops, Anatosaurus ( Lull, Wright, 1942 Edmontosaurus today ), 1904 Anchisauripus (a known only by footprints predators ) and 1905 Diceratops ( Hatcher, Lull ).
Among his pupils heard George Gaylord Simpson.
Writings
- Ancient Man, Doubleday 1928
- With John Bell Hatcher Ceratopsia (based on preliminary studies of Othniel C. Marsh ), Washington DC, United States Government Printing Office 1907
- A revision of Ceratopsia, New Haven 1933
- Triassic life of the Connecticut Valley, Hartford 1915 (State Geological and Natural History Survey of Connecticut, Bulletin 24)
- The ways of life, New York, London, Harper Brothers 1925