James A. Jensen
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James A. Jensen (died 1998) led a most remarkable life, dropping out of high school and ending up as a world-famous paleontologist, dubbed "Dinosaur Jim". (See <http://www.dinosaurjim.com> for his biography.) He left home during the depression, thumbed through thirty states, logged, mined, and worked in smelters. He married in Seward, Alaska in 1941, returned to the U.S., had two children, and underwent crash training in 1942 to become a machinist and welder. The next three years were spent at Hanford, WA working on a Manhattan Project reactor core, and at Pearl Harbor working on the reconstruction. He returned to the U.S. and worked at odd jobs, e.g. ceramics, gunsmithing, block printing, sculpting, journeyman welder, machinist, taxidermist, inventor, and writer. In 1951, he returned with his family to Seward, Alaska where he worked as a long shoreman for five years. In 1956, he started in paleontology as a preprator with Arnie Lewis under the direction of Alfred Sherwood Romer. In 1961, he moved to Brigham Young University where he worked until retirement in 1984. Notable events of his professional life include two six-month expeditions to the foothills of the Andes of Argentina with Harvard; expeditions to Nova Scotia, Ohio, West Virginia, Texas, Montana, Utah and Colorado; a three month expedition to Antarctica with Ohio State University; speaking engagements in numerous universities in the U.S., in Singapore, Tokyo and Manilla; twenty+ publications, his final being the posthumous publication of an account of two expeditions to Argentina in "The Road to Chilecitto"; a vast number of publicity items in writing and television; and perhaps most noteworthy, the development of a novel method for mounting dinosaurs designed to conceal the supporting armatures. (See <http://dinosaurjim.com/2.4___Kronosaurus_Queenslandicus.pdf>.) He is credited with discovering, among other things, Supersaurus (1972) and Ultrasauros (1979). He named Cathetosaurus (1988), Dystylosaurus (1985), the family Torvosauridae (1985) and Torvosaurus (with P.M. Galton, 1979); see <http://dinosaurjim.com/html/publications.html> for more details about scientic descritions. While at Brigham Young University (BYU), his annual fieldwork generated constant publicity for the University. BYU, badly needing non-controversial publicity at various points in time, e.g. the San Jose State black arm band demonstration in the 1970s, encouraged him to drag back and drop any quantity of specimens, knowing that they resulted in national and international publicity, but did not care about the bones themselves.[citation needed] The degree of their interest is reflected by the fact that he was forced in the 1960's to store the fragile, plaster-bandaged bones in the open in corrals, on pallets, which cattle used to scratch their backs, knocking bones to the ground. BYU's enticements to keep this wonderful publicity machine included several small and some empty promises. When he became tense about a museum to protect and house and finally mount the collection, the Administration would pat him on the head, commiserate with him, give him another promise to build one, and several more thousand dollars to that year's budget. He capitulated each time, content with the promises. However, Jensen eventually understood the duplicity of BYU when a life science museum that came on the scene many years after he started receiving promises for a museum was constructed. The paleo collection ended up weathered and vandalized beneath the football stadium, proving BYU's duplicity. A substantial portion the the collection is unaccounted for but is of not concern to the administration. The remnant of his years at BYU is a small museum that is not well financed and is sparsely staffed, but which does the best it can to prepare specimens from the small surviving collection. He was an enormously gifted artist who worked comfortably with plasticene, pastels, and arc welders. (<http://dinosaurjim.com/html/the_man.html>) His pastel and acrylic paintings, primarily of landscapes and American Indians, are hung from Alaska to Florida. His first contribution to preparation of dinosaurs was to develop a method, in 1957, to use plastic foam to cast antrodemus skulls that could be lifted with one finger. An example of his ability to apply his creativity to the harsh world of collection is the set of specialized tools and methods which he developed, with his wife's assistance, to collect in the hostile environment of Antarctica: a crab tent with eight individually extensible legs and a corresponding three-layer thick skin with zippers over each leg to adapt the structure to any terrain, a large metal sled for hauling heavy objects over icy surfaces, and a beeswax, blow torch, and shellac method for securing fragmented bones in sub-zero temperatures. "Dinosaur Jim", as he told a grandson, has become a legend and taken on a life of its own in the perennially fascinating world of dinosaurs (<http://dinosaurjim.com/html/links.html>). He was the most prolific dinosaur finder after Barnum Brown in the U.S. in the 1900s. This was due in part to his interest in "rock hounds" who jointly combed thousands of square miles of ground each year. He visited them every year or so, cultivating their friendship with gifts of dinosaur bones in return for information about their latest finds. After his death in 1998, the name "Dinosaur Jim", along with references in particular to ultrasaurus and superaurus, has appeared in books on dinosaurs, books for specialists, for amateurs and for school children. Dinosaur Jim's deep commitment to paleontology was reflected by his willingness to educate. For example, when he received manilla envelopes filled with sheafs of painfully-written notes from elementary student. <http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9807EED91639F932A15750C0A964948260> he took the time to read and reply individually to each student. His enormous enthusiasm for dinosaurs encouraged a small group of graduate students to become paleontologists, which has become his greatest legacy.
