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541 35 Lost in Plain Sight: Rediscovery of William E. Cutler’s Missing Eoceratops DARREN H. TANKE during the fall and winter of 1919–1920 and summer of 1920, William E. Cutler, despite ill health and poor weather, succeeded in uncovering and collecting a partial ceratopsian skeleton from quarry 78 in Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta. At the time, Cutler was not affiliated with any professional institution, and the specimen was put into storage in Calgary awaiting a buyer. None was immediately found, and the skeleton remained in Calgary for several years. Cutler died in Africa during fieldwork in 1925; the subsequent whereabouts of his ceratopsian became unknown and the specimen was seemingly lost. Since then a number of authors have tried to relocate the specimen; all have failed, due mainly to the confusing state of affairs related to the closing of a museum Cutler was involved with and improper dispersal of its fossil collection. This article explores the tangled history and successful 2005 relocation of the longlost skeleton. The implications of this relocation are also considered. Institutional Abbreviations. AB: Alberta, Canada; AMNH: American Museum of Natural History, New York; 1. Remittance men were typically young British males who were a problem to society or especially to their families. Often they were the second-born son, who would inherit little to nothing of the family estate. In an attempt to shoo them away from home and have them safely far away for good, wealthier families enticed the BMNH: collections acronym for the Natural History Museum, London; CMN: Canadian Museum of Nature, Ottawa; DPP: Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta; GSC: Geological Survey of Canada, Ottawa; NHM: Natural History Museum (formerly the British Museum Natural History [BMNH], London); RTMP: Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, Drumheller; TMP: collections acronym for the Royal Tyrrell Museum. [The author’s comments are contained within square brackets.] Background and Collection History William Edmund Cutler (Fig. 35.1) was an independent Alberta-based fossil collector whose paleontological activities in the province are incompletely known. Born in 1878, Cutler was apparently a rather eccentric character and was difficult to get along with. He first moved to Alberta from England in the late 1800s, quite possibly as a remittance man.1 After ranching and farming with English friend Frederick S. Presant on Threehills Creek in the Carbon, AB district for a young men to make a name for themselves in Canada or elsewhere in the colonies. The young men would be given a one-way ticket for a boat ride overseas and a sum of money to get started. To keep them away, a ‘‘remittance check’’ or allowance was sent to them at regular intervals. 542 tanke number of years (Anonymous 1986; Graf 1986), around 1912 he decided to try his hand at collecting dinosaur fossils for commercial gain. This decision may have been inspired by the intensive collecting activities of Barnum Brown (AMNH) and Sternberg family (GSC) about 20 km east and 33 km southeast of Cutler’s ranch in the Drumheller area. His earliest collecting efforts appear to have been near Drumheller, in and around the mouth of Kneehills Creek (Tarbuck 1972), and probably not far from where J. B. Tyrrell collected a partial Albertosaurus skull (CMN 5600) in 1884. April 1913 saw him collecting dinosaurs in DPP for the Calgary Syndicate for Prehistoric Research (a group of prominent and well-heeled Calgarian businessmen supporting Cutler’s fieldwork), and the now defunct Calgary Public Museum, an institution curating and displaying an eclectic assortment of human and natural history artifacts , including dinosaur fossils (Ritchie 1934). Later that summer, Cutler joined the AMNH crew, gaining several months’ valuable field experience with them before he was asked to leave. In 1914, he was back in DPP, where he collected the type of ‘‘Scolosaurus cutleri.’’ Unfortunately, the specimen collapsed on him during undercutting, resulting in serious upper body injuries (Tanke in prep.). During WWI, Cutler volunteered for military service in June 1915 (Anonymous 1915) and went overseas. After his rather undistinguished military service (Maier 2003), Cutler returned to Canada on the Canadian Pacific passenger liner Empress of Britain, landing in St. John on April 2, 1919, and expected to arrive back in Calgary with a large number of other former soldiers on April 5th (Anonymous 1919a). He soon resumed his paleontological ways, returning to DPP early in the summer of 1919 (Anonymous 1919b). Over the fall and winter of 1919–1920, Cutler camped alone in the badlands in DPP (Tanke 2004...

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