Lakewood Lore

Dinosaur discovery managed to keep museum Happy

With all the current to-do about dinosaurs, a Lakewood lad who became interested in nature past and present while working at Cleveland Metroparks Rocky River Reservation deserves some recognition.

After all, it isn't everyone who gets to have giant prehistoric critter named after him.

The lad, Edwin R. Delfs (now Dr. Delfs, 60) started out by helping at the reservation's nature center even before he graduated from Lakewood High School in 1952.

"I was a 'museum kid' who took care of live animals, looked for specimens and tended the wildflower trails," Delfs reminisced.

In 1954, when he was a 20-year-old junior at Yale University, he led a fossil hunt westward. It had been put together by the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, which was hoping for a centerpiece display -- preferably a dinosaur -- for its new location at University Circle.

The search took Delfs and three youthful companions bent on adventure -- Wesley Williams, William West and Richard Jones -- to a site in Colorado, north of Canon City, where they discovered the bones of one of the largest creatures ever to roam this planet.

"We ran into some geology students in the area who suggested we go to a certain spot that seemed promising," Delfs said.

They did, and started to excavate and -- eureka!

"Finding the rare specimen there was an enormous thrill for us and big news for the museum," he recalled.

The bones were those of a 72-feet-long, 14 1/2-feet-high dinosaur, whose lumbering 25-ton body trod the earth during the late Jurassic period 150 million years ago.

Furthermore, it turned out to be the only known sample of a new species in an infra-order of dinosaurs whose members are called sauropods.

The find had massive stump-like feet, strong enough to support its great weight. Its teeth were peg- or chisel-shaped for crunching plants, and many scientist believe it had a gizzard into which it gulped rocks from time to time to help in grinding its food.

Today, the creature is on display in the Kirtland Hall of Prehistoric Life at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History, where its 40th birthday since discovery is being celebrated.

Its full name is Haplocanthosaurus delfsi, but it has been nicknamed "Happy" for short. The last part of its scientific moniker honor Delfs as leader of the search team.

Michael E. Williams, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the museum and responsible in part for coining the huge dinosaur's long name, explains it this way:

"When a new species is found, the scientists involved are expected to give it a name that could be after one of a number of things, such as an area, a state, a kind of rock, a prominent feature of the specimen, or for the discoverer.

"Edwin Delfs deserved the recognition because he headed the expedition in 1954. Besides, he returned to the site for more diggings in 1955 and in 1977."

"But why was the 'i' added to Delfs' name in Happy's designation?" we further probed.

"That's because scientific names are required to be in Latin, or Latinized," William explained.

Delfs was born of Teutonic descent on Cleveland's East Side in 1934. His family moved to Lakewood when he was 11. Here, he attended Roosevelt Elementary School and Emerson Junior High before entering Lakewood High, where he was editor of the Lakewood High Times and where he became interested in paleontology (a science dealing with the life of past geological periods, as known from fossil remains).

From the nature center in Rocky River Valley, Delfs went on to help out at the Natural History Museum when the latter was housed in the now-demolished Hanna mansion of Euclid Avenue.

He earned a pre-med degree from Yale in 1956 and did graduate work in paleontology at Columbia University for three years. Then, he returned to Lakewood and enrolled in Case Western Reserve's Medical School, where he received a degree in obstetrics in 1963.

Delfs married Annella Chappus of Windsor, Canada. The couple has three children and now lives in Los Altos Hills in the San Francisco area of California.

Delfs' parents -- Edwin Sr., an executive with Bell Telephone Co. in Cleveland, and Lillian, a school teacher -- died in the 1950s. A sister, Virginia Delfs, who also graduated from Lakewood High, currently resides in North Randall.

Although Delfs now is a practicing gynecologist, he remains enthralled with fossil hunting. Last month, he returned from another dig in Colorado, where he found more bones -- some up to 5 feet long -- that belonged to still a different dinosaur species.

"I plan to retire from medicine in five years," he said, "and thereafter devote every summer to paleontology."

This article by Dan Chabek appeared in the Lakewood Sun Post August 18, 1994. Reprinted with permission.

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