Roland T. Bird
Roland Thaxter Bird (December 29, 1899 – January 24, 1978) was an American palaeontologist. He is best known for his discovery of fossil trackways of the Paluxy River in Texas, and work with the American Museum of Natural History. Early life Bird was born on December 29, 1899, in Rye, New York. When he was 14, a respiratory condition forced him to drop out of high school, and after his mother died from tuberculosis, he was advised by a doctor to move to his uncle's farm. In the 1920s and 1930s, he struggled financially due to the Great Depression and traveling throughout the United States on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle working odd jobs, including as a cowboy in Florida. Paleontology career Bird discovered his first fossil, the skull of an amphibian, in 1932 while camping in the Petrified Forest National Park area. He sent the skull to his father, an amateur entomologist, who passed it along to Barnum Brown, then a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History. The specimen was a previously undiscovered genus and species of dinosaur, which would later be named Stanocephalosaurus birdi, and the discovery led to Bird's employment at the Museum in