From the cabinet, real fossil teeth of a brontothere from the South Dakota Badlands. I bought this specimen as a child in 1955 at the gift shop in the School of Mines and Technology, University of South Dakota, in Rapid City. Shortly there after, upon my first visit to the Field Museum in Chicago’s (then called the Chicago Natural History Museum) 4th floor Geology Department, Chief Preparator Orville Gilpin took out a knife and carved away most of the excess Badlands matrix. Who would have thought that I, as an adult volunteer fossil preparator in the Dinosaur Lab, Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, would be doing the same kind of work!
Painting of a brontothere by Matthew Kalmenoff for a stamp in Animals of the Past Stamps (A Golden Playbook, Simon and Schuster, 1954.
Souvenir postcard showing a skeleton of Brontops robustus, a titanothere from the South Dakota Badlands, mounted at the Museum of Geology, South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.
Field Museum postcards (below) showing a “family” of life-sized “Brontops” (now called Megacerops) figures sculpted by museum artist Frederick Biaschke…and a black and white reproduction of a mural, showing the brontothere Brontotherium, painted by Charles R. Knight for the museum during the late 1920s (one of a set of such postcrds issued by the museum showing all of these murals).
