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Introduction ROLAND THAXTER BIRD was born on December 29, 1899, the first of four children of Henry and Harriet Slater Bird of Rye, New York. Henry Bird was a successful businessman, a practical man who insisted that his children learn a trade; thus at one point in his youth R. T. was apprenticed to a plumber. At the same time, however, Henry Bird (or "Pater," as his children called him) had a deep respect for learning. He was himself a distinguished amateur entomologist who did important studies on noctuid moths. The Bird household was a warm and stimulating environment. As children, R. T. and his sister Alice (the closest of his siblings in age) were each given one of the original Teddy Bears; Harriet made vests for the bears, and R.T. built cars, boats, airships, and even a house with electric lights for them. Alice also had a china doll, and on one occasion she and R. T. decided that the doll needed a baby, so they stuffed tissue up its dress to make it look pregnant-presumably to the consternation of their elders. Pater had purchased first editions of both Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn and frequently read aloud from them to his children, not infrequently being interrupted by his own uncontrollable laughter. Not surprisingly, R. T. developed a lifelong love for the works of Mark Twain, and in writing his memoir thought of himself as a kind of latter-day, scientific Huck Finn. Given the nature of his childhood environment, it is not surprising that R. T. went on to distinguish himself as a fossil collector, or that his brother Junius became a leader in the field ofSouth American archaeology. Harriet Bird died of tuberculosis at the age of forty-two, when R. T. was only fifteen years old. The boy's health had never been robust (he frequently suffered from colds), and Henry feared that his son might also contract tuberculosis. Upon the advice of the family doctor R. T. was sent away from the coastal town of Rye to live on an uncle's farm in the Catskills; there he developed an interest in cattle and their husbandry that he retained for the rest of his life. As a young adult R. T. went to work on a farm in Florida, caring for Jersey cattle and traveling about the country showing them at exhibitions. He invested in real estate during the Florida land rush of the 1920'S and, like so many others, lost what little money he had in the economic crash at the end of the decade. After constructing a motorcyclecamper , Bird wandered about the country, visiting all of the states and supporting himself by doing odd jobs; so it was that in November, 1932, at the age of thirty-two, he passed through northern Arizona and discovered the fossilized skull that changed his life. Bird's career as a dinosaur hunter was short but eventful. He assisted in the collection of some very important specimens, and his chscovery ofsauropod footprints in the Cretaceous rocks of Texas made him a significant figure in the history of paleontology . To put his career, and that of Barnum Brown, the employer Bird admired so much, into a proper perspective, we need to review the history of the study of dinosaurs. In 1802 a boy named Pliny Moody found some fossilized footprints in rocks of the Connecticut River Valley near South Hadley, Massachusetts. These tracks were so similar to those of birds that local people referred to them as poultry tracks, or the footprints of Noah's raven. More and more such tracks turned up at an increasing number of localities, and some of these were quite large-as much as eighteen inches long, suggesting "poultry " on a grand scale. The tracks came to the attention of Edward Hitchcock, a geologist and clergyman who became a professor of chemistry, geology, and theology, and president of Amherst College. Hitchcock zealously collected and described fossil tracks from the Connecticut Valley, the culmination of his work being Ichnology of New England. A Report on the Sandstone ofthe Connecticut Valley, Especially Its Fossil Footmarks, published by the State of Massachusetts in 1858 (a supplement to this tome was published posthumously in 1865). Hitchcock compared the three-toed tracks in his collection to those of birds and concluded that they had been made by huge flightless birds similar to modern ostriches, rheas, cassowaries, and emus, and to even larger extinct birds like...

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