Richard Swann Lull (b. 1867, d. 1957) was born at Annapolis,
Maryland, on November 6, 1867, the son of a naval officer, Edward
Phelps Lull, and Elizabeth Burton, the daughter of General Henry
Burton. Fortunately for vertebrate paleontology, poor eyesight kept him
from following in his father’s footsteps into the Naval Academy.
Lull majored in zoology at Rutgers College and received both his
undergraduate and graduate degrees from there (M.S. 1896; honorary
D.Sc. 1918). He worked briefly for the Division of Entomology of the
U.S. Department of Agriculture, but in 1894 took a position as an
assistant (later associate) professor of zoology at the State
Agricultural College in Amherst, Massachusetts (now the University of
Massachusetts at Amherst). It was at the other college in Amherst,
Amherst College, renowned for its collection of fossil footprints from
the red beds of the Connecticut River valley, where Lull’s fascination
with fossil footprints began. This enthusiasm ultimately led him to
change course from entomology to paleontology.
To gain field experience in paleontology, Lull worked as a member of
the American Museum of Natural History’s party at Bone Cabin Quarry,
Wyoming, in 1899, helping to collect that museum’s brontosaur skeleton.
In 1902, he again joined an American Museum crew in the field, this
time in Montana. His close association with the American Museum led to
his studying under Henry Fairfield Osborn (one of the originators of
the vertebrate paleontology collection at Princeton University). In
1903 he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University.
In 1906, after a short stint at Amherst, Lull accepted a dual
appointment as Assistant Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology in Yale
College, and Associate Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Yale
Peabody Museum. He served in one curatorial capacity or another for the
next 50 years, continuing on as Curator Emeritus some 20 years after
his obligatory retirement from the University in 1936.
As a teacher, Lull was well loved. His undergraduate course on organic
evolution became one of the most popular on campus. The content of
these lectures has been preserved in his book Organic Evolution. He
discouraged graduate students from specializing in vertebrate
paleontology, as jobs in that discipline were so very scarce even then.
Only about half a dozen students took their doctorates directly under
him, including E.L. Troxell, M.R. Thorpe and G.G. Simpson.
In his 1958 “Memorial to Richard Swann Lull,” Simpson notes that “The
names Marsh, Lull, and Yale are so strongly linked in the history of
paleontology that it is almost a shock to recall that Marsh and Lull
never met….” The contrasts between these men are extraordinary. Lull
was a consummate teacher; O.C. Marsh
did little or no teaching. While Marsh spent much of his time and money
acquiring material for the Museum, Lull made relatively few additions
to the collections, taking part in only 3 field expeditions after
coming to Yale. He seems to have lost his interest in fieldwork early
on. According to Simpson, Lull often remarked that the best collecting
he knew was in the basement of the Peabody. On his shoulders was left
the herculean task of making the Marsh Collection accessible to researchers and seeing that it was safely housed.
It was during Lull’s term as Director (1922–1936) that the Yale Peabody
Museum moved into its present building. Under Lull’s supervision,
portions of the Marsh Collection were mounted for display in the
Museum. To this end, Lull oversaw not only the mounting of the famous
dinosaur skeletons in the Great Hall,
but also created many scale models and restorations for use in the
exhibits. One of his more ingenious methods of displaying skeletons was
to mount the bones of a fossil on one side and sculpt a restoration of
the animal on the other. That the Museum was designed not only to serve
the University but also to attract and educate the greater New Haven
community is one of Lull’s greatest achievements.