Elmer S. Riggs

Elmer S. Riggs (January 23, 1869 – March 25, 1963) was an American paleontologist known for his work with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois. He was born in Trafalgar, Indiana January 23, 1869, but moved with his family to Kansas at a young age. He received bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Kansas and then worked with the American Museum of Natural History. In May 1898, he joined the staff of the Field Museum (then the Field Columbian Museum). He began work in Morrison Formation rocks of Wyoming and Colorado. In 1900 he and his crew recovered the first known skeleton of the giant sauropod dinosaur Brachiosaurus altithorax from near Fruita, Colorado, and in 1901 they found a specimen of Apatosaurus in the same area, which is on display at the Field Museum. From these specimens he named Brachiosaurus and Brachiosauridae, and presented evidence that Apatosaurus and Brontosaurus were the same genus of dinosaur. He also proposed that sauropods were terrestrial animals, based on their limb structure, but this was largely dismissed in favor of aquatic sauropods until the 1970s, when the idea was revived by Robert Bakker.

Following these discoveries, he turned to fossil mammals, and worked throughout the western United States and South America until 1931. One particularly notable find was the fossils of the saber-toothed marsupial Thylacosmilus, which he found in Pliocene-age rocks of Argentina in 1927 and named in 1933. He became the Curator of Paleontology at the Field Museum, and was employed by the museum until he retired in 1942. He was also sought-after as a lecturer, and was still conducting speaking tours many years after retiring from the Field Museum. He died on March 25, 1963, in Sedan, Kansas, at the age of 94.