at
Como-Bluff during the
American Museum of Natural History expedition of 1897 with limb bone of
Diplodocus specimen AMNH 223 In 1891, Osborn was hired by
Columbia University as a professor of
zoology; simultaneously, he accepted a position at the
American Museum of Natural History, New York, where he served as the curator of a newly formed Department of
Vertebrate Paleontology.
Fossil hunting As a curator, he assembled a remarkable team of fossil hunters and preparators, including
William King Gregory,
Roy Chapman Andrews,
Barnum Brown, and
Charles R. Knight. Long a member of the
US Geological Survey, Osborn became its senior vertebrate paleontologist in 1924. He led many fossil-hunting expeditions into the
American Southwest, starting with his first to
Colorado and
Wyoming in 1877. Osborn conducted research on
Tyrannosaurus brains by cutting open fossilized braincases with a diamond saw. (Modern researchers use computed tomography scans and 3D reconstruction software to visualize the interior of dinosaur endocrania without damaging valuable specimens.) On November 23, 1897, he was elected member of the
Boone and Crockett Club, a wildlife conservation organization founded by
Theodore Roosevelt and
George Bird Grinnell. Thanks to his considerable family wealth and personal connections, he succeeded
Morris K. Jesup as the president of the AMNH's Board of Trustees in 1908, serving until 1933, during which time he accumulated one of the finest
fossil collections in the world. Additionally, Osborn served as president of the
New York Zoological Society from 1909 to 1925. He was elected as a member to the
American Philosophical Society in 1886. He accumulated a number of prizes for his work in paleontology. In 1901, Osborn was elected a Fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He described and named
Ornitholestes in 1903,
Tyrannosaurus rex and
Albertosaurus in 1905,
Pentaceratops in 1923, and
Velociraptor in 1924. In 1929 Osborn was awarded the
Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the
National Academy of Sciences.
American Museum of Natural History His legacy at the American Museum has proved more enduring than his scientific reputation.
Edward J. Larson described Osborn as "a first-rate science administrator and a third-rate scientist." Indeed, Osborn's greatest contributions to science ultimately lay in his efforts to popularize it through visual means. At his urging, staff members at the
American Museum of Natural History invested new energy in display, and the museum became one of the pre-eminent sites for exhibition in the early twentieth century as a result. The murals, habitat dioramas, and dinosaur mounts executed during his tenure at the museum attracted millions of visitors, and inspired other museums to imitate his innovations. But his decision to invest heavily in exhibition also alienated certain members of the scientific community and angered curators hoping to spend more time on their own research. Additionally, his efforts to imbue the museum's exhibits and educational programs with his own racist and eugenist beliefs disturbed many of his contemporaries and have marred his legacy.
Research Osborn was a supporter of the "tritubercular theory" of the evolution of mammalian teeth, originally proposed by Edward Drinker Cope based on fossil tooth morphology, and a rival to the "concrescence theory" proposed by German dentist and physician Carl Röse based on analysis of the development of modern mammal teeth. The tritubercular theory held that the multicusped molar teeth of mammals evolved from single cusped teeth like those found in reptiles, and that a three-
cusped (tritubercular) pattern is the ancestral organisation of mammalian molars. The tritubercular theory was criticised by Röse and other contemporary scholars for being incogruent with knowledge obtained from analysis of modern tooth development, and was corrected to fix some issues by later scholars.
Osborn's system of naming for the
cusps and other elements of mammalian teeth has been widely adopted by later scholars. Osborn's research on
proboscideans, the group containing
elephants and their extinct relatives has been described as a "modern stimulus and driving force for research" on the group. In particular, his posthumous
monograph on the group, published in two volumes in 1936 and 1942, has been called a "landmark of evolution and natural history of the Proboscidea". His work on North American mammoth taxonomy has been described as introducing considerable taxonomic confusion for arbitrarily naming a
neotype specimen for the
Columbian mammoth (
Mammuthus columbi) without adequate justification, as well as introducing several mammoth species that are now regarded as synonymous with the Columbian mammoth. Osborn largely failed to take into account the effect of tooth wear on the shape of mammoth teeth, which was a partial cause of the confusion. Osborn was involved in organising the American Museum of Natural History's "Central Asiatic Expeditions" to Eastern Asia in the 1920s headed by
Roy Chapman Andrews, with a major goal being to find proof for the "Out of Asia" theory of mankind's origins that Osborn advocated. Osborn described a number of species based on remains found during the expeditions, such as
Andrewsarchus (named after Andrews) as well as several now invalid species of
Paraceratherium. He was a member of the
American Association for Anatomy.
Public outreach Osborn was one of the most well known scientists in the United States during his own lifetime, “second only to
Albert Einstein", During the 1925
Scopes Monkey Trial regarding the teaching of human evolution, Osborn wrote a book
The Earth Speaks to Bryan responding to the lawyer
William Jennings Bryan, a critic of evolution and prosecutor on the case (who Osborn had debated in writing for several years prior to the trial), a compilation of speeches defending evolution and suggesting that evolution and religion were compatible. ==Theories==