Charles H. (Charles Hazelius) Sternberg

Born in New York in 1850 and later raised in Kansas, Charles Hazelius Sternberg became one of the best-known fossil collectors of his era. He taught himself to search the chalk beds and plains of the West, then turned that skill into a long career recovering prehistoric animals for major museums.

From the 1870s into the 1920s, he collected fossils for leading scientists and institutions, including Edward Drinker Cope, Othniel Charles Marsh, the Natural History Museum in London, and the San Diego Natural History Museum. He was especially known for his fieldwork in the American West and for helping uncover important dinosaur and other vertebrate fossils.

Sternberg also wrote about his adventures, most famously in The Life of a Fossil Hunter. His work helped shape public fascination with dinosaurs at a time when paleontology still involved long expeditions, uncertain funding, and hard physical labor in remote country.