Books: Recent & Readable: Aug. 5, 1940

O. C. MARSH, PIONEER IN PALEONTOLOGY—Charles Schuchert & Clara Mae LeVene—Yale ($5).

Most of the Marshes went to Harvard: Othniel Charles Marsh went to Yale. There he became the first U. S. professor of paleontology. For Yale he wheedled from his uncle, crusty Financier-Philanthropist George Peabody, some $200,000 for the Peabody Museum of Natural History. For the Museum he assembled the largest collection of fossil vertebrates of his day, including the completely reconstructed skeletons of twelve dinosaurs, one pterodactyl. On his fossil hunts in the Wild West he dis covered that U. S. dinosaurs sometimes weighed 40 tons, that cretaceous birds had teeth, that cretaceous seas contained sea serpents. He helped organize the U. S. Geological Survey (see p. 66), was a lifelong friend of British Evolutionist Thomas Huxley. He exposed the Cardiff Giant (“a gypsum man, ten and a half feet long, nude, virile and unabashed”) as a fake. His biography by Clara LeVene and Professor Schuchert, one of the few co-workers whose respect and affection managed to transcend the great paleontologist’s “autocratic tendency,” reconstructs the life of Othniel Charles Marsh with as much care and completeness as Marsh reconstructed his fossils.