When he offered it to the Buffalo Society of Natural History, they decided to appoint him curator, and this marked the beginning of Richard's scientific career.
[1] In 1880, he became curator of marine invertebrates at the United States National Museum in Washington, D.C. On October 6, 1880, he married Lena Augusta Hume in Eastport, Maine.
[3] Around 1898, Rathbun, in his position as assistant secretary to the Smithsonian Institution, received a letter from the then-unknown Wilbur Wright requesting information.
[4] Orville Wright later stated that this large package from the Smithsonian enabled him and his brother to solve a problem of balance that had caused most previous attempts at heavier-than-air flight to fail.
[1] Richard Rathbun was honored for his services to science by David Starr Jordan and Barton Warren Evermann in 1896 when they named the ronquil genus Rathbunella.