Charles Hazelius Sternberg

The son of a minister, Charles Sternberg looked for God's handiwork in nature, and finished his long career satisfied that he had found what he was looking for. When the young Sternberg's family moved from upstate New York to the Kansas frontier in the 1860s, he found himself surrounded by the Cretaceous Dakota sandstone, rich with fossils. Sternberg not only did well in rich fossil country, he also had a knack for finding fossils in areas that had already been combed by earlier fossil hunters.

Young Sternberg hoped to prospect for O.C. Marsh, but when that attempt failed, he turned to E.D. Cope. Cope funded Sternberg's first professional expedition, beginning a long and fruitful collaboration. In subsequent years, Sternberg would marvel at Cope's energetic and sometimes reckless behavior and eventually describe their adventures in The Life of a Fossil Hunter. Sternberg would also strike out on his own, collecting for the American Museum of Natural History and the British Museum, among others.

Cope collected all kinds of fossils from the Paleozoic through the Cenozoic, but he is probably best known for the dinosaur fossils he found. He raised three sons: George, Charlie and Levi, who all became talented fossil collectors in their own right. The crowning achievement of Sternberg's career came in 1908, when his son George found a duckbill dinosaur mummy, with much of the skin intact. Originally reserved for the British museum, the fossil ended up in the American Museum of Natural History. The Sternbergs again found duckbill dinosaurs with skin impressions some years later, but the fossils were lost in transit to England when a World War I German warship fired on the vessel carrying them.

Charles Hazelius Sternberg (June 15, 1850 – July 20, 1943), was an American fossil collector and amateur paleontologist.

Biography

Sternberg's older brother, Dr. George M. Sternberg (1838–1915) was a military surgeon assigned to Fort Harker near Ellsworth, Kansas and brought the rest of Sternberg family to Kansas to live on his ranch about 1868. Once there, Charles became interested in collecting fossil leaves from the Dakota Sandstone Formation. In the 1870s, he studied at Kansas State under the noted paleontologist Benjamin Franklin Mudge, but he soon left school in order to spend more time in the field.

During the early years of the Bone Wars, Charles Sternberg collected fossils in Kansas for Edward Drinker Cope. He wrote two books: The Life of a Fossil Hunter (1909) and Hunting Dinosaurs in the Badlands of the Red Deer River, Alberta, Canada (1917).

Charles married Anna Musgrave Reynolds on 7 July 1890. One son died in toddlerhood and their only daughter died at age 20 in 1911. Three sons survived into adulthood: George F. Sternberg (1883–1969), Charles Mortram Sternberg (1885–1981) and Levi Sternberg (1894–1976) — also had careers in vertebrate paleontology. They became famous for their collecting abilities and many discoveries, including the "Trachodon mummy", an exquisitely preserved specimen of Edmontosaurus annectens (see hadrosaurid). Son George was also a noted fossil hunter famous for finding the iconic "fish within a fish" — a 13 ft Xiphactinus which had inside it a nicely preserved, 6 ft Gillicus arcuatus.

Sternberg was a deeply religious man. He wrote devotional poetry and published a collection of poems 'The Story of the Past: Or, the Romance of Science'. In his old age, he would visit the American Museum of Natural History to view his finds, and one visit to the 'Trachodon mummy' inspired the following quote:

“My own body will crumble in dust, my soul return to the God who gave it, but the works of His hands, those animals of other days, will give joy and pleasure to generations yet unborn.”

—Charles H. Sternberg

Sternberg Museum

Fossils collected by Charles Sternberg, including dinosaurs from the western United States and Canada, are in museums around the world. Many of the fossils discovered by Charles Sternberg's son, George F. Sternberg, are on display in the Sternberg Museum of Natural History in Hays, Kansas.

In popular culture

In the 1994 novel End of an Era by Robert J. Sawyer, the Canadian protagonists' time machine is named His Majesty's Canadian Timeship Charles Hazelius Sternberg, because of the two scientists journeying back to the Cretaceous era, one is a paleontologist. The narrator comments that "our timeship is almost universally known as the Sternberger, because to most people it looks like a fat hamburger."

The 2007 novel The Bone Sharps by Tim Bowling centres about the fossil-hunting work of Charles Sternberg in Kansas, in 1876 and 1916. Secondary characters are Sternberg's young assistant, Scott, who served in the trenches of World War I; another bone hunter, Scott's fiancee (1916) and possibly widow (1975), Lily; and Charles Sternberger's deceased daughter, Maud; as well as Edward Drinker Cope and Cope's wife Annie.

• Residence: Ellsworth County, Kansas - 1880
• Residence: Ottawa, Canada - 1916
  • Reference: MyHeritage Family Trees - SmartCopy: Apr 1 2018, 16:12:04 UTC