Childs Frick was a trustee of the American Museum of Natural History and a constant benefactor of vertebrate paleontology there. He was especially interested in the extinct animals that had lived in North America before humans arrived there. Frick's many excavations in the American west and other areas revealed the diversity of North American mammals before the Ice Ages. It was his efforts, more than anyone else's, that gave us our present knowledge of North American camels, rhinos, antelope-like animals, deer, and carnivores, once as abundant and diverse as the more familiar present-day animals of East Africa.