Barnum Brown's Broken Pick: A Dinosaur Hunter's Ghost in Big Bend

Paleontologists like to say they stand on the shoulders of giants — not the dinosaurs, but the great fossil hunters whose discoveries shaped what we know about the animals that ruled the Earth for about 160 million years before their sudden extinction some 66 million years ago.

The giant

Barnum Brown, born in 1873, was curator of fossil reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In the early 1900s he became famous for discovering Tyrannosaurus rex in the badlands of Wyoming, and by the mid-twentieth century he was one of the best-known scientists in the world — a globe-trotting showman of paleontology, the "Indiana Jones" of his day, as celebrated as the monsters he hunted.

Big Bend, 1940

In the summer of 1940, Brown and his longtime field assistant R. T. Bird drove their old Ford delivery wagon into the desert badlands of what is now Big Bend National Park, over ground that would test a modern four-wheel drive. Brown was in his mid-sixties; Bird was often ill. In the heat they searched rugged country and collected important fossils from Late Cretaceous rocks:

• skull parts of Deinosuchus, a huge primitive alligator;
• an intact skull of the armored dinosaur Edmontonia;
• the skull and limb bones of an enormous duck-billed hadrosaur;
• a partial skeleton of a horned dinosaur like Triceratops;
• giant bones of Alamosaurus, a long-necked titanosaur that may have weighed 50 tons or more.

Brown had doubted that long-necked sauropods survived into the Late Cretaceous. The Big Bend bones changed his mind — and made the park North America's best place to study them. Because of the onset of World War II, these were the last dinosaur bones he ever collected. He died in 1963.

W. S. Strain's crew at WPA quarry #3 near Talley Mountain, 1938 or 1939, in a Works Progress Administration paleontological project. WPA photo

The WPA quarries

In 1938–39, W. S. Strain and a team from the college of mines and metallurgy in El Paso (now the University of Texas at El Paso), with help from the Works Progress Administration, had dug several large quarries near Talley Mountain, looking for a dinosaur skeleton to mount in the college's new Centennial Museum. Brown came partly because he had heard of Strain's success: Big Bend was then untouched dinosaur country, and he did not mean to miss it. One of Strain's quarries lies less than half a mile from where Brown and Bird found the great jaw of Deinosuchus.

The ghost, 1980

On another hot day in 1980, Tom Lehman, then a geology graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, was hunting fossils in the park with the eminent paleontologist Wann Langston Jr. Langston, born in 1921, was a younger colleague of Brown's and had met him once or twice; the two were exploring some of the same ground Brown and Bird had covered forty years before.

In the floor of WPA quarry #3, Lehman found a broken rock pick. An old tool in an old quarry was no surprise. But this one had been arranged: the snapped handle laid beside the rusted head, and both ringed with fragments of dinosaur bone gathered from nearby — as if its last owner had laid a trusted companion to rest. Lehman photographed it without disturbing it and went to fetch Langston.

Langston looked, Lehman recalled, as if he had seen a ghost. What struck him was not the quarry or the circle of bones but the pick itself. It was a "dinosaur pick", a special tool invented by Barnum Brown in the 1930s. None of Strain's crew, Langston explained, would have owned one, or thrown away something so useful and valuable; only Brown could have known of such a tool, or afforded to carry it.

At that time the pick was no archeological treasure — just a discarded bit of junk that Langston and Lehman had the foresight to record and keep. Langston had it framed, and for years it hung on his office wall at the University of Texas. After his death, at the author's request, his family returned it to Big Bend National Park, where it is now in the park's collections — a link between one of the greatest paleontologists and the park where he found his last dinosaurs.

Sources

Based on "Monster Hunters in Big Bend — a Ghost from the Past," by Steven L. Wick, University of Texas at Austin, for Park Paleontology News, volume 16, number 1 (Spring 2024), National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain. Wick has studied Big Bend's dinosaurs for more than 25 years and knew both Lehman and Langston. The original's T. rex skull photo (Wikimedia Commons) and its 1932 Popular Science sidebar showing Brown with his pick are left out. Langston's and Lehman's words are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.