Osborn, Henry Fairfield

Henry Fairfield Osborn, (born August 8, 1857, Fairfield, Connecticut, U.S.—died November 6, 1935, Garrison, New York), American paleontologist, eugenicist, and museum administrator who greatly influenced the art of museum display and the education of paleontologists in the United States and Great Britain.

Born to a prominent and wealthy family, Osborn was the eldest son of railroad tycoon William Henry Osborn and his wife, Virginia Osborn. At Princeton University, Henry Fairfield Osborn conducted studies of brain anatomy while serving as assistant professor of natural sciences (1881–83) and professor of comparative anatomy (1883–90). He spent the greater part of his career in New York City, as professor of biology (1891–96) and zoology (1896–1935) at Columbia University, but devoted most of his attention to the city’s American Museum of Natural History.

As curator of the department of mammalian (later changed to vertebrate) paleontology (1891–1910) and president of the museum (1908–35), Osborn accumulated one of the world’s finest vertebrate fossil collections. Osborn also served as vertebrate paleontologist (1900–24) and senior geologist (1924–35) with the U.S. Geological Survey. He conducted a number of important expeditions and named several dinosaur genera and species, including Ornitholestes (1903), Tyrannosaurus rex and Albertosaurus (1905), Pentaceratops (1923), and Velociraptor (1924). He introduced a highly successful instructional approach to museum display and was an effective popularizer of paleontology. He later served on the board of trustees of the museum and as the head of the New York Zoological Society (1909–25; now the Wildlife Conservation Society).

A passionate eugenicist, Osborn believed that there are fundamental biological differences between races that could justify the control of human reproduction, and he advocated for the belief in the biological superiority of the white race. In 1918 Osborn helped found the Galton Society with zoologist Charles Benedict Davenport and lawyer Madison Grant. Purporting to be a scientific society, the group used the scientific reputation of its members and now-debunked scientific studies of racial differences to further the U.S. eugenics movement, including passage of immigration restriction laws. In 1926 he, Grant, and several others founded the American Eugenics Society, which aimed to educate the (white) public about eugenics and supported the efforts of the Galton Society and the Race Betterment Foundation. The society also influenced the eugenic policies set by the U.S. Supreme Court in v. Bell  (1927) .

Osborn proposed the valuable concept of adaptive radiation, postulating that a plant or animal in many cases evolves into several species by scattering over a large land area and adapting to different ecological niches. In 1901 he was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His works include From the Greeks to Darwin (1894), The Age of Mammals (1910), and Origin and Evolution of Life (1917).