August Frederick Foerste

August Frederick Foerste (born May 7, 1862 in Dayton (Ohio) , † April 23, 1936 ibid) was an American paleontologist and geologist.

After graduating from high school in Dayton in 1880, Foerste was a teacher at a village school in Ohio for three years before he began studying at Denison University (bachelor's degree in 1887). Even then he was concerned with paleontology and worked and collected with the local professor CL Herrick. He then went to Harvard University , where he studied physical geography with William Morris Davis and petrography with JE Wolff. In 1888 he received his master's degree there and in 1890 he received his doctorate with a dissertation in petrography. During this time he also worked part-time with the US Geological Survey as an assistant to Nathaniel Shaler and Raphael Pumpelly . As a post-doctoral student , he was studying abroad in Heidelberg and Paris ( Collège de France ). A job with the Geological Survey fell through as the number of jobs was reduced, and he became a high school teacher in Dayton in 1893. In 1932 he retired. He turned down offers to teach at universities and colleges because, in his opinion, he would have more time for research. In the summer he worked intermittently for the Geological Surveys of Indiana, Ohio and Kentucky and the Geological Survey of Canada. From 1920 he spent most of the summers doing research at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington DC, where he moved completely after retirement. He was never married.

As a schoolboy he collected plants and then fossils (especially from the Silurian Mountains of the Clinton Formation in Ohio). Most of his work appeared in the Bulletin of the Scientific Laboratories of Denison University, founded in 1885. He also had contacts with Edward Oscar Ulrich and Alpheus Hyatt (at Harvard). His revision of hundreds of species of previously insufficiently described invertebrate fossils was important and he dealt with the systematics of cephalopods of the Silurian and Ordovician.

In 1928 he was President of the Paleontological Society , which he co-founded. He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the Ohio Academy of Sciences (and its president in 1931), and the Washington Academy of Sciences.

literature

• Kirtley F. Mather: Foerste, August Frederick, in Dictionary of Scientific Biography