Wilfred Hudson Osgood

Osgood was born in Rochester, New Hampshire, the oldest child of a family of watchmakers. The family moved to California in 1888 and he went to study in Santa Clara and San Jose. He joined in the activities of the Cooper Ornithological Club and found company in Chester Barlow and Rollo H. Beck. He taught at a school in Arizona for a year and then moved to the newly formed Stanford University, where he came to meet Charles H. Gilbert and David Starr Jordan. He joined the staff of the Bureau of Economic Ornithology and Mammalogy, of the United States Department of Agriculture at the age of 22. This group later became the Bureau of Biological Survey under Clinton Hart Merriam.

In 1909 he moved to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, where he was assistant curator of mammalogy and ornithology from 1909 to 1921, and curator of zoology from 1921 to 1940. He collected in North America and Chile. He traveled with Louis Agassiz Fuertes to Ethiopia in the 1920s. He wrote The Mammals of Chile (1943) and co-wrote Artist and Naturalist in Ethiopia (1936). He died a bachelor on 20 June 1947.

While working at the Field Museum, he was elected a member of the London Zoological Society (along with Teddy Roosevelt) in 1910.