History In Play

Barnum Brown

As a history major during undergrad I thoroughly enjoyed reading personal accounts and the language of the early 20th century and earlier. It always makes my day when I can find original accounts from the past so that others can read them. Sometimes they are not highly descriptive or well written (probably in part because of the massive influx of fossil materials from the North American West during those years). Barnum Brown's description is fairly well done, though it does lack a little here and there. The massive amounts of photographs and comparative line drawings fill in a lot of the gaps though. In more recent times Jordan Mallon and Robert Holmes have spent a great deal of their time redescribing postcranial remains and variations in Anchiceratops. If the book, a great tome on ceratopsian dinosaurs with a plethora of wonderfully authored chapters, is not available to you online, and neither is the JVP article, then I encourage the readers to get out there and find copies of either one used somewhere. I realize that that is not very helpful, but it is the best advice and both the chapter and the article are worth the time taken to find them and read them.