THE FIRST EXPEDITIONS TO THE WHITE RIVER BADLANDS, THE NEW HAVEN, PHILADELPHIA, PRINCETON, AND ALBANY CONNECTIONS

The first well-studied Tertiary mammalian fauna in North America was from the upper Eocene to lower Oligocene White River Group of South Dakota. Alexander Culbertson, the chief agent of the American Fur Company, collected the first vertebrate fossils in the early 1840’s along the Fort Pierre–Fort Laramie road that crossed the Badlands in and adjacent to the modern Badlands National Park. Culbertson brought these fossils to Hiram Prout in Saint Louis and his father Joseph Culbertson in Pennsylvania. Prout was given a huge lower jaw of what we now know as a brontothere, and Prout sent a letter and diagram describing this fossil to James Dana and Benjamin Silliman of Yale University. This letter and a subsequent description were published in the American Journal of Science in 1846 and 1847 becoming the first fossil described from the Badlands. The Culbertson family fossils were brought to Joseph Leidy of the Philadelphia Academy of Sciences, and Leidy started in 1847 a long series of publications on the fossil vertebrates from the western United States. In 1849 the first geologic expedition to the Badlands was led by John Evans as part of the Dale Owens geologic survey of Iowa and Minnesota. In May of 1850, Thaddeus Culbertson, the half-brother of Alexander Culbertson and a student at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton University), travelled to the Badlands and spent a day collecting fossils for Spencer Baird, then at Dickinson College at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, but soon to be at the Smithsonian Institution. James Hall of the New York Geological Survey became interested in having a collection of fossils from the Badlands, and he sent Fielding B. Meek and a young Ferdinand V. Hayden on a collecting expedition to the Badlands in June and early July of 1853. The fossils from the Evans, Thaddeus Culbertson, and Meek and Hayden expeditions were studied by Leidy, and resulted in Leidy’s 1853 and 1869 monographs on the White River fauna.