Bruce L. Clark

Bruce Lawrence Clark (born May 29, 1880 in Humboldt , Iowa , † September 23, 1945 ) was an American paleontologist . He was the first director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) at Berkeley.

Life

Clark was the son of a farmer and moved the family to Southern California in 1904, where he attended Pomona College . He studied geology and paleontology at the University of California, Berkeley was the master's degree in 1909 and doctorate in paleontology 1913. Previously, he was in 1911 Instructor in paleontology 1918 assistant professor and in 1923 associate professor . In 1923 he set up the first courses in micropalaeontology in Berkeley , for which there was a great need due to the oil boom after the First World War . Another focus of his research was the tertiary and its invertebrate fauna on the Pacific coast. 1921-1926 he was the first director of the UCMP, in a time when there were tensions between the geologists and paleontologists in the Berkeley faculty after both faculties after the departure of John Campbell Merriam to Carnegie Institution have been merged.

As a geologist, he mapped the Mount Diablo region and studied the tectonics of the California coastal mountains . He pointed out to vertebrate paleontologists the abundant fossil record of mammals from the Miocene (9 million years old) on the Blackhawk Ranch near Mount Diablo. He himself collected a lot as a field paleontologist and added important collections from oil companies to the museum's collections.

Web links

• Joseph Gregory, Bruce L. Clark (1880-1945), first director of UCMP, UCMP

References and comments

1. ↑ Beverly Lane: Blackhawk Ranch Fossil Quarry, Museum of San Ramon Valley ( Memento of the original from July 3, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.