John Stanton McIntosh

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

Early life and education

McIntosh was born in Ford City, Pennsylvania on , 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.

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.

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. 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 , 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.

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. He completed his Bachelor of Science in 1949, his Master of Science in 1949, and his Doctor of Philosophy in 1952, all at Yale.

Career and research

McIntosh did not have any overlapping interests between physics and paleontology, but continued to pursue both upon graduation. 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. 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. Some of his most influential 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.

Two valid sauropods have been named after McIntosh, the brachiosaurid '' Abydosaurus mcintoshi'', and the macronarian '' Brontomerus mcintoshi''. '' Ultrasaurus macintoshi'' is also named after McIntosh, but is considered a synonym of '' Supersaurus''. 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.

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:McIntosh, John Stanton
American paleontologists
American physicists
1923 births
2015 deaths