John Stanton McIntosh

John McIntosh
John McIntosh
Born	January 6, 1923; Ford City, Pennsylvania
Died	July 16, 2015 (aged 92); Middletown, Connecticut
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale (BS), (MS), (PhD)
Known for	Research on sauropods
	Scientific career
Fields	Physics, Paleontology

Last updated January 17, 2025

John Stanton "Jack" McIntosh (1923 - 2015) was an American physicist and paleontologist who heavily influenced the study of sauropods.^[1] McIntosh worked professionally as a physicist at Wesleyan University until retirement in 1998, pursuing the study of sauropods during and after.^[2]

Early life and education

McIntosh was born in Ford City, Pennsylvania on 1923, and grew up attending school in Pittsburgh. At the age of five or six his father took him to the Carnegie Museum, where his awe at the Diplodocus and Camarasaurus skeletons sparked his interest in sauropods. Suffering from childhood illness, McIntosh was given a copy of Organic Evolution by paleontologist Richard Lull who taught ay Yale University. This prompted McIntosh, who was 13 or 14, to write a letter to Lull asking about the identities of the sauropods Cardiodon , Cetiosaurus , and Apatosaurus . Lull replied redirecting McIntosh to ask Charles W. Gilmore instead.^[3]

Following high school graduation in 1941, McIntosh started studying physics at Yale University. He visited the Yale Peabody Museum, and asked then-curator Ed Lewis if he could work on dinosaurs. Lewis tasked McIntosh with repairing a damaged neck vertebra of Apatosaurus mounted by Othniel Charles Marsh. Fir his first year at college, McIntosh worked in one of the dinosaur halls at the museum; for his second year he was employed putting damaged bones back together. During this second year, McIntosh met Barnum Brown while repairing a femur of Coelurus , who excitedly invited McIntosh to the American Museum of Natural History where he was working on a very similar bone. Brown showed McIntosh the bones he was working on, which he referred to as "Daptosaurus" and "Microdontosaurus". Brown retired soon after, but the specimens he and McIntosh drew and measured were named Deinonychus and Microvenator by his successor John Ostrom.^[3]

Military service

Around when McIntosh turned 19, the US entered World War II, and as part of the Greatest Generation he was enlisted into the military.^[2] Having finished two years of college, McIntosh was sent to learn meteorology and radar as part of the US Army Air Corps at Brown University, MIT, and Harvard. While at Harvard, he visited the Museum of Comparative Zoology and met Alfred Sherwood Romer, who was reading papers by Chinese paleontologist C.C. Young on prosauropods he was researching. A month into his third year of college, McIntosh was called up by the Air Corps and sent over Guam as a flight weather officer in a B-29, also completing 21 or 22 missions over Japan. Flying in weather planes at altitudes around 32,000 feet (9.8 km), these missions were never badly damaged by Japanese fire, with only rare engine failure leading to landing on Iwo Jima for maintenance. McIntosh's last mission was on Victory over Japan Day.^[3]

In the aftermath of the Japanese surrender, McIntosh was in Oklahoma City for discharge, when he took a trip to visit paleontologists J. Willis Stovall and Wann Langston Jr.. After getting discharged, he returned to Yale to complete his degree in physics. McIntosh took physics formally as it was believed at the time that dinosaur paleontology was not the field for a career.^[3] He completed his Bachelor of Science in 1949, his Master of Science in 1949, and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1952, all at Yale.^[2]

Career and research

McIntosh did not have any overlapping interests between physics and paleontology, but continued to pursue both upon graduation.^[3] As his PhD was focused on nuclear physics, McIntosh joined the theoretical physics group Project Matterhorn at Princeton University led by Archibald Wheeler that worked in developing the first H-bomb. After the completion of this project in 1953, he remained at Princeton as an Associate Professor, later moving to become chair of the Wesleyan University Physics Department in Middletown, Connecticut where he worked until his retirement in 1998.^[2] During this time as a professional physicist, McIntosh continued to study and research sauropods, publishing books on the history of the dinosaur collections by Marsh (with Ostrom), the field journals of collector Arthur Lakes (with Michael Kohl), and a bibliography of dinosaurs (with Dan Chure). In the 1960s he visited Museo de La Plata in Argentina to organize the collections, as well as publishing a catalogue of all the dinosaur specimens at the Carnegie Museum.^[4] Some of his most influencial works are the identification of the proper skull of Apatosaurus, and the chapter of The Dinosauria on sauropods, which was the definitive review of the group.^[4]^[5]^[6]

Two valid sauropods have been named after McIntosh, the brachiosaurid Abydosaurus mcintoshi , and the macronarian Brontomerus mcintoshi .^[5] Ultrasaurus macintoshi is also named after McIntosh, but is considered a synonym of Supersaurus .^[7]^[8] The 2005 book The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology was dedicated to McIntosh for his work on the group, and featured two interviews by the editors of McIntosh about his life and his work.^[3]^[5]

Publications

McIntosh, J.S. (1965). "Marsh and the dinosaurs". Discovery: Magazine of the Peabody Museum of Natural History. 1 (1). Yale University: 31–37.
Ostrom, J.H.; McIntosh, J.S. (1966). Marsh's Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff. Yale University Press. p. 388.
McIntosh, J.S.; Berman, D.S. (1975). "Description of the palate and lower jaw of the sauropod dinosaur Diplodocus (Reptilia: Saurischia) with remarks on the nature of the skull of Apatosaurus". Journal of Paleontology. 49: 187–199.
McIntosh, J.S. (1977). Dinosaur National Monument. Constellation Phoenix. p. 33.
Berman, D.S.; McIntosh, J.S. (1978). "Skull and relationships of the Upper Jurassic sauropod Apatosaurus (Reptilia, Saurischia)". Bulletin of Carnegie Museum of Natural History. 8: 1–3.
Dodson, P.; Behrensmeyer, A.K.; Bakker, R.T.; McIntosh, J.S. (1980). "Taphonomy and Paleoecology of the Dinosaur Beds of the Jurassic Morrison Formation". Paleobiology. 6: 208–232.
Russell, D.A.; Béland, P.; McIntosh, J.S. (1980). "Paleoecology of the dinosaurs of Tendaguru (Tanzania)". Mémoires de la Société Géologique de France, Nouvelle Série. 59 (139): 169–176.
McIntosh, J.S. (1981). "Annotated catalogue of the dinosaurs (Reptilia, Archosauria) in the collections of Carnegie Museum of Natural History". Bulletin of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. 18: 1–64.
Mateer, N.J.; McIntosh, J.S. (1985). "A new reconstruction of the skull of Euhelopus zdanyski (Saurischia: Sauropoda)". Bulletin of the Geological Institutions of the University of Uppsala, N.S. 11: 125–132.
Berman, D.S.; McIntosh, J.S. (1986). "Description of the lower jaw of Stegosaurus (Reptilia: Ornithischia)". Annals of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. 55 (2): 29–40.
Raath, M.A.; McIntosh, J.S. (1987). "Sauropod dinosaurs from the central Zambezi River Valley, Zimbabwe and the age of the Kadsi Formation". South African Journal of Geology. 90 (2): 107–119.
McIntosh, J.S.; Williams, M.E. (1988). "A new species of sauropod dinosaur, Haplocanthosaurus delfsi sp. nov., from the Upper Jurassic Morrison Fm. of Colorado". Kirtlandia. 43: 3–26.
Chure, D.J.; McIntosh, J.S. (1989). A bibiography of the Dinosauria (exclusive of the Aves) 1677-1986. Vol. 1. Museum of Western Colorado Paleontology Series. pp. 1–226.
McIntosh, J.S. (1990). "Sauropoda". In Weishampel, D.B.; Osmólska, H.; Dodson, P. (eds.). The Dinosauria. University of California Press. pp. 345–401. ISBN 0-520-06727-4.
McIntosh, J.S. (1990). "Species determination in sauropod dinosaurs with tentative suggestions for their classification". In Carpenter, K.; Currie, P.J. (eds.). Dinosaur systematics: Approaches and Perspectives. Cambridge University Press. pp. 53–69. ISBN 0-521-36672-0.
McIntosh, J.S.; Coombs, W.P.; Russell, D.A. (1992). "A new diplodocid sauropod (Dinosauria) from Wyoming, U.S.A.". Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. 12 (2): 158–167.
Madsen, J.A.; McIntosh, J.S.; Berman, D.S. (1995). "Skull and Atlas-Axis complex of the Upper Jurassic sauropod Camarasaurus Cope (Reptilia: Saurischia)". Bulletin of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. 31: 1–115.
McIntosh, J.S.; Miller, W.E.; Stadtman, K.L.; Gillette, D.D. (1996). "The osteology of Camarasaurus lewisi (Jensen, 1988)". BYU Geolgy Studies. 41: 73–115.
Kohl, M.F.; McIntosh, J.S. (1997). Discovering Dinosaurs in the Old West: The Field Journals of Arthur Lakes. Smithsonian. p. 198. ISBN 978-1560987000.
Ostrom, J.H.; McIntosh, J.S. (1999). Marsh's Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff (2nd ed.). Yale University Press. p. 388. ISBN 0300082088.
McIntosh, J.S. (2005). "The Genus Barosaurus Marsh (Sauropoda, Diplodocidae)". In Tidwell, V.; Carpenter, K. (eds.). Thunder Lizards: the Sauropodomorph Dinosaurs. Indiana University Press. pp. 38–77. ISBN 0-253-34542-1.

Related Research Articles

<i>Apatosaurus</i> Sauropod dinosaur genus from Late Jurassic period

Apatosaurus is a genus of herbivorous sauropod dinosaur that lived in North America during the Late Jurassic period. Othniel Charles Marsh described and named the first-known species, A. ajax, in 1877, and a second species, A. louisae, was discovered and named by William H. Holland in 1916. Apatosaurus lived about 152 to 151 million years ago (mya), during the late Kimmeridgian to early Tithonian age, and are now known from fossils in the Morrison Formation of modern-day Colorado, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Wyoming, and Utah in the United States. Apatosaurus had an average length of 21–23 m (69–75 ft), and an average mass of 16.4–22.4 t. A few specimens indicate a maximum length of 11–30% greater than average and a mass of approximately 33 t.

<i>Camarasaurus</i> Camarasaurid sauropod dinosaur genus from Late Jurassic Period

Camarasaurus was a genus of quadrupedal, herbivorous dinosaurs and is the most common North American sauropod fossil. Its fossil remains have been found in the Morrison Formation, dating to the Late Jurassic epoch, between 155 and 145 million years ago.

Barosaurus was a giant, long-tailed, long-necked, plant-eating sauropod dinosaur closely related to the more familiar Diplodocus. Remains have been found in the Morrison Formation from the Upper Jurassic Period of Colorado, Utah, South Dakota, and eastern Wyoming at Como Bluff. It is present in stratigraphic zones 2–5.

Como Bluff is a long ridge extending east–west, located between the towns of Rock River and Medicine Bow, Wyoming. The ridge is an anticline, formed as a result of compressional geological folding. Three geological formations, the Sundance, the Morrison, and the Cloverly Formations, containing fossil remains from the Late Jurassic of the Mesozoic Era are exposed.

Aepisaurus was a genus of sauropod dinosaur from the Albian-age Lower Cretaceous Grès vert of Département du Vaucluse, France, around 100.5 million years ago. It is an obscure genus from an unknown family, represented by a single humerus, now partly lost. Despite its lack of popularity, or perhaps because of it, it has been misspelled several ways in the scientific literature, with multiple dates given to the year of description as well.

Haplocanthosaurus is a genus of intermediate sauropod dinosaur. Two species, H. delfsi and H. priscus, are known from incomplete fossil skeletons. It lived during the late Jurassic period, 155 to 152 million years ago. The type species is H. priscus, and the referred species H. delfsi was discovered by a young college student named Edwin Delfs in Colorado, United States. Haplocanthosaurus specimens have been found in the very lowest layer of the Morrison Formation, along with Hesperosaurus mjosi, Brontosaurus yahnahpin, and Allosaurus jimmadseni.

Brontosaurus is a genus of herbivorous sauropod dinosaur that lived in present-day United States during the Late Jurassic period. It was described by American paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh in 1879, the type species being dubbed B. excelsus, based on a partial skeleton lacking a skull found in Como Bluff, Wyoming. In subsequent years, two more species of Brontosaurus were named: B. parvus in 1902 and B. yahnahpin in 1994. Brontosaurus lived about 156 to 146 million years ago (mya) during the Kimmeridgian and Tithonian ages in the Morrison Formation of what is now Utah and Wyoming. For decades, the animal was thought to have been a taxonomic synonym of its close relative Apatosaurus, but a 2015 study by Emmanuel Tschopp and colleagues found it to be distinct. It has seen widespread representation in popular culture, being the archetypal "long-necked" dinosaur in general media.

Jeffrey A. Wilson, also known as JAW, is a paleontologist and professor of geological sciences and assistant curator at the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan.

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<i>Camarasaurus supremus</i> Species of sauropod dinosaur

Camarasaurus supremus is a species of sauropod dinosaur that lived during the Jurassic period in what is now the western United States. It is the type species of Camarasaurus, which also includes the species Camarasaurus grandis, Camarasaurus lentus, and Camarasaurus lewisi. C. supremus was discovered by the paleontologist Edward Drinker Cope in 1877, at the outset of the Bone Wars, a period of scientific competition between Cope and his rival Othniel Marsh. C. supremus is the largest and geologically youngest species in its genus, and was contemporary with several other exceptionally large dinosaurs, such as Saurophaganax and Maraapunisaurus. Despite being the first discovered species of Camarasaurus, C. supremus is relatively rare and poorly known.

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Camarasaurus lentus is an extinct species of sauropod dinosaur that lived during the Jurassic period in what is now the western United States. It is one of the four valid species of the well-known genus Camarasaurus. C. lentus fossils have been found in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah. It is the species of Camarasaurus found in Dinosaur National Monument and the middle layers of the Morrison Formation. Camarasaurus lentus is among the best-known sauropod species, with many specimens known. A juvenile specimen of C. lentus, CM 11338, is the most complete sauropod fossil ever discovered.

Amphicoelias is a genus of herbivorous sauropod dinosaur that lived approximately 150 million years ago during the Tithonian of what is now Colorado, United States. Amphicoelias was moderately sized at about 18 metres (59 ft) in length and 15 metric tons in body mass, shorter than its close relative Diplodocus. Its hindlimbs were very long and thin, and its forelimbs were proportionally longer than in relatives.

Diplodocus is an extinct genus of diplodocid sauropod dinosaurs known from the Late Jurassic of North America. The first fossils of Diplodocus were discovered in 1877 by S. W. Williston. The generic name, coined by Othniel Charles Marsh in 1878, is a Neo-Latin term derived from Greek διπλός (diplos) "double" and δοκός (dokos) "beam", in reference to the double-beamed chevron bones located in the underside of the tail, which were then considered unique.

References

↑ Curry Rogers, K.A.; Wilson, J.A., eds. (2005). The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology. University of California Press. pp. v. ISBN 0-520-24623-3.
1 2 3 4 "Remembering Jack McIntosh". Wesleyan University. January 2023. Retrieved 16 January 2025.
1 2 3 4 5 6 Curry Rogers, K.A.; Wilson, J.A., eds. (2005). "A conversation with Jack McIntosh". The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology. University of California Press. pp. 327–334. ISBN 0-520-24623-3.
1 2 Wilson, J.A. (16 December 2015). "Hogarthian Lines". University of Michigan. Archived from the original on 19 December 2024. Retrieved 16 January 2025.
1 2 3 Taylor, M.P. (14 December 2015). "In praise of Jack McIntosh". SVPOW. Retrieved 16 January 2025.
↑ Middletown Press (19 December 2015). "DR. JOHN S. "JACK" McINTOSH". Legacy. Retrieved 16 January 2025.
↑ Jensen, J.A. (1985). "Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado". The Great Basin Naturalist. 45 (4): 697–709. doi: 10.5962/bhl.part.4439 .
↑ Curtice, Brian D.; Stadtman, Kenneth L.; Curtice, Linda J. (1996). "A re-assessment of Ultrasauros macintoshi (Jensen, 1985)". In Morales, M. (ed.). The Continental Jurassic: Transactions of the Continental Jurassic Symposium (PDF). Vol. 60. Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin. pp. 87–95.

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[dedication-1] Curry Rogers, K.A.; Wilson, J.A., eds. (2005). The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology. University of California Press. pp. v. ISBN 0-520-24623-3.

[wesleyan-2] 1 2 3 4 "Remembering Jack McIntosh". Wesleyan University. January 2023. Retrieved 16 January 2025.

[interview-3] 1 2 3 4 5 6 Curry Rogers, K.A.; Wilson, J.A., eds. (2005). "A conversation with Jack McIntosh". The Sauropods: Evolution and Paleobiology. University of California Press. pp. 327–334. ISBN 0-520-24623-3.

[wilson-4] 1 2 Wilson, J.A. (16 December 2015). "Hogarthian Lines". University of Michigan. Archived from the original on 19 December 2024. Retrieved 16 January 2025.

[taylor-5] 1 2 3 Taylor, M.P. (14 December 2015). "In praise of Jack McIntosh". SVPOW. Retrieved 16 January 2025.

[legacy-6] Middletown Press (19 December 2015). "DR. JOHN S. "JACK" McINTOSH". Legacy. Retrieved 16 January 2025.

[jensen1985-7] Jensen, J.A. (1985). "Three new sauropod dinosaurs from the Upper Jurassic of Colorado". The Great Basin Naturalist. 45 (4): 697–709. doi: 10.5962/bhl.part.4439 .

[curticeetal1996-8] Curtice, Brian D.; Stadtman, Kenneth L.; Curtice, Linda J. (1996). "A re-assessment of Ultrasauros macintoshi (Jensen, 1985)". In Morales, M. (ed.). The Continental Jurassic: Transactions of the Continental Jurassic Symposium (PDF). Vol. 60. Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin. pp. 87–95.

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John McIntosh
Born	(1923-01-06)January 6, 1923 Ford City, Pennsylvania
Died	July 16, 2015(2015-07-16) (aged 92) Middletown, Connecticut
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Yale (BS), (MS), (PhD)
Known for	Research on sauropods
Scientific career
Fields	Physics, Paleontology