A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer: The Journals of Barnum Brown and J .P. Sams Wyoming The University of Kansas Expedition of 1895

By Edited by Michael F. Kohl, Larry D. Martin & Paul Brinkman

One June morning in 1895, five men made their final goodbyes on a platform in Lawrence, Kansas.

The men—a politician, a professor, two students, and an interested citizen—were leaving town for the summer. They would live among the grasslands, badlands, dry, white-bottomed creek beds and Cretaceous rocks of eastern Wyoming, which they hoped to find rich in dinosaur bones.

Two of the students—Barnum Brown, and Elmer Riggs—would go on to lead two of the most important American careers in dinosaur paleontology of the twentieth century. Their professor, Samuel Wendell Williston, was just reaching his prime. For his new museum at the university, Williston wanted the skull of a Triceratops—the enormous-headed, three-horned, rhino-like dinosaur of the Cretaceous Period, the first of which had been described for science only six years before. What would come to be called the Kansas University Expedition of 1895 would succeed in finding just such a skull.

Two accounts of the expedition survive, and both are offered here. Neither is heavy in scientific obscurities. Both offer fascinating snapshots of the West at a time when it was changing fast. The first journal was kept by Brown on his wagon journey from Kansas to Wyoming. The second and far more extensive journal was kept by James Polk Sams, a middle aged Kansas farmer, former probate judge, and member of the Board of Regents of the University of Kansas. Sams was pious, humorous, teetotaling, curious and kind. The editors have put the diaries in context with footnotes.

• 0-931271-77-0 • trade paper • index • bibliography • 192 pp • photos • $15.95 ORDER NOW • 0-931271-76-2 • limited edition hardcover, signed & numbered • $35.00
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Discovering Dinosaurs in the Old West

By special arrangement with the Smithsonian Institution Press we are able to offer:

Discovering Dinosaurs in the Old West
The Field Journals of Arthur Lakes
Edited by Michael F. Kohl and John S. McIntosh

“Between 1877 and 1880, geologist Arthur Lakes filled field journals with eyewitness reports on the early days of vertebrate paleontology in [Colorado and] Wyoming. His accounts of wildlife, the Indian Wars, and academic warfare between rival paleontologists…offer a rare glimpse of tough-and-ready dinosaur hunting in the Old West.”

•• Natural History

• 1-56098-963-7 • trade paper • index • notes • 198 pp • photos • $16.95 ORDER NOW • 1-56098-700-6 • cloth • $27.95 ORDER NOW

A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer: The Journals of Barnum Brown and J .P. Sams Wyoming The University of Kansas Expedition of 1895

By Edited by Michael F. Kohl, Larry D. Martin & Paul Brinkman

“Academic but accessible to the general reader…”
•• Scitech Book News

Edited by Michael F. Kohl, Larry D. Martin & Paul Brinkman

Michael Kohl was born and educated in Wisconsin, earning graduate degrees in History, Library Science, and Business Administration from the University of Wisconsin at Madison. He has worked as an archivist and librarian in Wisconsin, Rhode Island, and California before going to Clemson University as head of the University Libraries Special Collections in 1982. He has given presentations about topics related to history, archives, and records management, as well as co-editing Discovering Dinosaurs in the Old West: The Field Journals of Arthur Lakes with John McIntosh, published by the Smithsonian Institution Press. During the past decade he has also given presentations on the history of paleontology in the West at meetings of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and at Dino Fest.

Larry D. Martin was born in western Nebraska, and earned degrees in Zoology and Geology at the University of Nebraska and worked closely with the Director of the University of Nebraska State Museum, C. Bertrand Schultz. Schultz and Martin discovered a new group of saber-toothed carnivores, the Barbourofelinae. Martin received a Ph.D. in Systematics and Ecology at the University of Kansas and later became curator of vertebrate paleontology at KU’s Biodiversity Institute. Martin also holds courtesy appointments in the Department of Geology, the Kansas State Geological Survey, and the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Kansas.

Paul Brinkman is the assistant director of the paleontology and geology research lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Science. His doctoral dissertation was on the early history of vertebrate paleontology at Chicago’s Field Museum. He holds a history degree from Augustana College, Rock Island, IL, spent two field seasons digging fossils in Wyoming, and worked for several years as a fossil preparator at the Field Museum, particularly on Sue, the Tyrannosaurus rex, discovered in South Dakota.