Como Bluff

If it is indeed true that Como Bluff once (during the 19th century) captured a world wide interest that circumstance was due to a man named Marsh.

O. C. Marsh was a scientist who lived during the early development ---at least early American development---of geology as a true natural science and who significantly contributed to that development. He received much of his youthful education from Yale College (graduating there in 1860) and through further study on the European Continent. In 1865 he returned to Yale to assume a professorship of paleontology---the first such post to exist in America. His uncle, a multi-millionaire named George Peabody, not only provided for the building of the Museum of Natural History at Yale but also liberally contributed toward the collections which went into that museum. Since a large measure of Peabody's contributions were entrusted to Marsh, he was able to make almost whatever extent of fossil collections that suited his inspiration. And, at Como Bluff, Marsh was unusually inspired.

How this circumstance worked out to make Como Bluff a significant historical spot is best told by John H. Ostrom and John S. McIntosh in their book Marsh's Dinosaurs. To quote from those pages:

In a very real sense, a rather ordinary looking locale in southern Wyoming, commonly known as Como Bluff, had an extraordinary influence on the development, both philosophical and architectural, of many of the great museums of the New World, and probably on the principal museums in Europe as well. Short of the original gift by George Peabody to Yale College in 1866, it would be difficult to cite a more significant event in the hundred years of Peabody Museum's history than the discovery of this particular ridge. Como Bluff was the site of the first major discovery of dinosaur remains anywhere in the world. From this place were collected many of the fine skeletons now displayed in the Peabody Museum at Yale, the National Museum of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D. C., and the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Discoveries by Yale parties at Como Bluff during the late 1870s and 1880s precipitated a number of expeditions by the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, Harvard College, the American Museum of Natural History, the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh, the University of Wyoming, the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, and the National Museum of Canada at Ottawa, all in search of comparable specimens for display in their public galleries. Today, there is scarcely a major museum of natural science in the New World---or anywhere else---that does not count at least one dinosaur among its prize exhibits. And there is little dispute about the great public appeal of such displays.

By the 1900s it was fashionable to design museum buildings around the prospect or specific plan that such structures would in due time shelter an assortment of giant saurians of past eras. And it was not long before there was a brisk trade in dinosaur skeletons to many of the smaller museums being founded all over North America and to many of the well-established and famous museums of Europe, Dinosaur skeletons became status symbols and soon every museum had to have its own; today they are still very much in fashion. All of this can be attributed directly to Como Bluff and the great variety, the unbelievable numbers, and the exceptional preservation of dinosaurian skeletons uncovered there. Never before had such spectacular fossil remains been found.

Messrs. Ostrom and McIntosh have---as the title of their work implies---been particularly interested in dinosaurs. That is they have been interested in a past geological era where-in reptilian animals predominated as differentiated from the present geological era where-in mammalian animals predominate. And, of course, so it was with Othniel Marsh and his contemporaries of the 1870's and later decades, it was the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic Era which held their interest and excited their activity. Now, a century later, comes a respected Wyoming geologist, John Albanese, who thinks it important to point out that the Como Bluff fossil quarries also have a connection with these later day and more highly developed forms of animal life, the mammals. In Mr. Albanese's words:

Marsh's legacy is still bearing fruit. A recent examination of his original collection from Como Bluff, stored for decades in the basement of Peabody Museum, revealed the presence of some mammal bones. Next to a locale in Wales, these are the oldest mammal remains yet found on earth. These mammals were tiny creatures, no larger than a small mouse.