LAMBE

Lawrence Morris Lambe was born on 27 August 1863 in Montreal, Quebec, the son of William Busby Lambe and Margaret Morris. He joined the Geological Survey of Canada (GSC) 1884, where he trained as a geologist, palaeontologist, and ecologist, becoming one of the institution's most productive researchers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By the 1890s he was already conducting formal fossil surveys, and in 1897 he became the first scientist to systematically search for dinosaur remains in what is now Dinosaur Provincial Park, Alberta — a region that would later become one of the world's richest dinosaur localities.

Lambe was not a flamboyant fieldworker; contemporary accounts describe him as methodical, quiet, and more comfortable with anatomical study than with large-scale expeditions. Although he discovered the richness of the Red Deer River badlands, he soon delegated major collecting operations to professional fossil hunters such as the Sternberg family, whom he commissioned in 1912 to gather material for the GSC. Lambe preferred the careful, solitary work of sorting, naming, and describing the enormous volume of fossils that arrived in Ottawa.

Lambe's published work did much to bring Alberta's dinosaurs to international attention, helping usher in the province’s early "Golden Age of Dinosaurs" between the 1880s and World War I. He described numerous iconic taxa, and his name is commemorated in Lambeosaurus (1923) as well as species such as Anodontosaurus lambei and Colepiocephale lambei. His monographs on ceratopsians, hadrosaurs, and tyrannosaurids remain foundational, including his work on the nearly complete Gorgosaurus skeleton collected by the Sternbergs in 1913. Lambe died on 12 March 1919 at his home in Ottawa, leaving behind one of the most influential bodies of early Canadian dinosaur research.