Michael Kohl
"A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer Wyoming:
The Journals of Barnum Brown & J. P. Sam:
The University of Kansas Expedition of 1895"

Monday, November 1 -- 7:00pm
Wyoming Stock Growers' Room (American Heritage Center)
Reception, 6:30pm; Book Signing, 8:00pm

Free and Open to the Public

Michael Kohl's new book, A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer Wyoming: The Journals of Barnum Brown & J. P. Sams: The University of Kansas Expedition of 1895 he recounts the adventures of Professor Samuel Williston and a group of rugged young dinosaur hunters from the University of Kansas to barely-settled Wyoming. They were searching for Triceratops, the three-horned dinosaur, still new to science. Professor Williston, at the prime of an important career in paleontology, had a new museum at the university he wanted to fill with bones and fossils. A Triceratops would be a perfect addition. This expedition was a turning point for two of the young students (Barnum Brown and Elmer Riggs) who would go on to eminent bone-hunting careers of their own. As Riggs later wrote, they chose to follow the lure of paleontology [while] lying awake...among the sagebrush of Wyoming to enjoy the coolness of a desert night, and looking up into the starry canopy above. Wyoming, still a tough cowboy place, only five years a state, was just beginning as well. Here young Barnum Brown and University Regent James P. Sams, record in two separate journals the colorful details of the expedition.

Michael Kohl was born and educated in Wisconsin, earning graduate degrees in history, library science, and business administration from the University at Madison. He has worked as an archivist and librarian at repositories in Wisconsin, Rhode Island, and California, before coming to Clemson as Head of the University Libraries Special Collections unit in 1982. He has written and given presentations about topics related to history, archives, and records management besides co-editing Discovering Dinosaurs in the Old West: The Field Journals of Arthur Lakes, published in 1997. He has been a volunteer on paleontological digs in Montana and Wyoming sponsored by Earthwatch, the Smithsonian Institution, and the University of Wyoming.