Elmer Samuel Riggs (January 23, 1869 – March 25, 1963) was an American paleontologist known for his work with the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Illinois.

He received bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Kansas and then worked with the American Museum of Natural History.

In the summer of 1898 he began with a field season in the Oligocene White River beds of South Dakota and Nebraska working under his department chairman, Oliver Farrington, a meteoriticist.

On July 4, 1900, Riggs' assistant, H. William Menke, found the first known skeleton of the giant sauropod dinosaur Brachiosaurus altithorax from near Grand Junction, Colorado.

[8] A “little carnivorous dinosaur” fossil that he brought back from Alberta, Canada, in 1922 was determined after field jackets were removed in 1999, to be Gorgosaurus, a tyrannosaurid.