John Bell Hatcher

Hatcher was born on October 11, 1861, in Cooperstown, Illinois, to John B. Hatcher (b. 1835) and Margaret Columbia O'Neal (b. 1842). Hatcher attended the Guthrie County High School, in Panora, Iowa, and graduated in 1881. Education He first took an interest in paleontology and geology while working as a coal miner to save money for school and discovering fossils of ancient organisms. He matriculated at Grinnell College in 1880 or 1881, then transferred to Yale University's Sheffield Scientific School in 1882, in part because of the school's esteemed faculty which included James Dwight Dana, a well-renowned professor of geology. After receiving an education in geology, mineralogy, zoology, and botany, Hatcher graduated with a bachelor of philosophy degree from the "Sheff" in 1884 with the graduation thesis "On the Genus of Mosses termed Conomitrium." Before graduating, he showed his coal mines collection of Carboniferous fossils to George Jarvis Brush, professor of metallurgy and director of the Sheffield Scientific School, who then introduced him to the paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh. ==Career==

Yale University & the United States Geological Survey Embroiled with a passion for collecting fossils, Hatcher was hired by Marsh in 1884, In 1896, Hatcher conceived of, planned, and secured the greater part of the funding for three expeditions to Patagonia, as well as the idea of publishing the results of the expeditions with funding from J. Pierpont Morgan. Beginning in 1900, with recommendations from Dana, Marsh, Scott, and Yale President Timothy Dwight, Hatcher was hired by William Jacob Holland as curator of paleontology and osteology for the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, succeeding Jacob Lawson Wortman. Hatcher supervised William Harlow Reed and hired Charles Whitney Gilmore during his time at the Carnegie Museum. In addition to supervising field expeditions and excavations, he was responsible for the scientific investigation and display of Diplodocus carnegii, a species named by Hatcher for his patron Andrew Carnegie (1835–1919), the Scottish-American industrialist. Finished in 1907, casts of "Dippy" were sent to museums in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Russia, Spain, Argentina, and Mexico. Hatcher's monograph on the find was published in 1901 as Diplodocus Marsh: Its Osteology, Taxonomy, and Probable Habits, with a Restoration of the Skeleton. After succeeding Marsh as the paleontologist for the United States Geological Survey, Osborn asked Hatcher to complete a monograph on Ceratopsia begun by Marsh, who had died a few years earlier. Hatcher agreed but died before the publication was complete; the work was finally completed by Richard Swann Lull in 1907 and included an illustration by famed paleoartist Charles R. Knight. ==Personal life==

Hatcher had six brothers and four sisters. Throughout his life, Hatcher suffered from health ailments. What was diagnosed as "rheumatism" during his lifetime is now thought by descendants to have been Type 1 osteogenesis imperfecta. In 1887, Hatcher married Anna Matilda Peterson. They had seven children, three of whom did not reach adulthood. Hatcher died in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on July 3, 1904, of typhoid fever. ==Legacy==

He is interred in Pittsburgh's Homewood Cemetery. For 91 years his grave went unmarked (his widow and children moved back to Iowa after his death). However, at the 1995 annual meeting in Pittsburgh of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, some members bought him a headstone engraved with his name and the name of his daughter, Ruth, and the sandblasted image of Torosaurus.'' ==References==