He is best known for his discovery of fossil trackways including the first scientifically documented sauropod tracks in the Glen Rose Formation near the Paluxy River in Texas, an area later designated the Dinosaur Valley State Park,[1] and work with the American Museum of Natural History.
When he was 14, a respiratory condition forced him to drop out of high school, and after his mother died from tuberculosis, he was advised by a doctor to move to his uncle's farm.
[3] In the 1920s and 1930s, he struggled financially due to the Great Depression and traveling throughout the United States on a Harley-Davidson motorcycle working odd jobs, including as a cowboy in Florida.
He sent the skull to his father, an amateur entomologist, who passed it along to Barnum Brown, then a curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History.
The specimen was a previously undiscovered genus and species, which would later be named Stanocephalosaurus birdi, and the discovery led to Bird's employment at the Museum in 1934, where he worked as a fossil collector for Brown.