Osborn

Osborn Henry (Henry F. Osborn; born in 1857), famous American paleontologist; graduated from Princeton University in 1877, then was a student of embryologist Balfour and the famous Huxley, a friend of Darwin, and professor of various zoological disciplines at Princeton (1881-1910). Since 1891, he was curator of the Department of Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, to the arrangement of whose excellent exhibits he devoted much labor. Osborn's scientific works over more than 50 years contain over 750 titles. The main area of his work is vertebrate paleontology. His research on rhinoceroses, horses, titanotheres, and dinosaurs is considered particularly important. Osborn actively determined the geological age of extinct mammals and established the correlation of Tertiary strata of Europe and America and the strata of their mammals. Being a convinced evolutionist, Osborn expressed, especially in later years, original and little-shared views on the form of evolution and the origin of man. Finding in 1919 a complete skeleton of the modern horse in the middle Pliocene, i.e., during the dominance of the three-toed horse (hipparion), Osborn by analogy concluded that such an early adaptation could have existed in humans as well. He suggested that remains of humans with a well-developed brain may be found even in the Tertiary period. He found confirmation for this idea in the fact that the Piltdown skull (with a voluminous brain and an ape-like jaw) was assigned by some geologists to the Tertiary period. Believing that in addition to natural selection, in some cases phylogenetic development can proceed rapidly in connection with impulses coming from the glands of internal secretion, Osborn pushes the origin of humans much further back in geological time than other scientists. This construction, based moreover on "Dollo's law," contains so many controversial positions that it cannot be accepted at the present time. Osborn's main works have been published in Russian. In recent years, his "Man of the Stone Age" (L., 1924) and "The Discovery of Tertiary Man" (journal "Priroda", 1930, no. 7-8) have been published in our country.