Charles Emerson Beecher

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Charles Emerson Beecher

Charles Emerson Beecher (born October 9, 1856 in Dunkirk (New York) , † February 14, 1904 in New Haven (Connecticut) ) was an American paleontologist .

Beecher began collecting fossils as a teenager in the Warren, Pennsylvania area , where he grew up. He studied from 1874 to 1878 at the University of Michigan , then from 1878 to 1888 he was assistant to the New York state geologist James Hall (as well as Charles Doolittle Walcott ) at the New York State Museum. Then Othniel Charles Marsh brought him to the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University as curator for fossil invertebrates , where he received his doctorate from Marsh in 1891 on Silurian sponges (Brachiospongidae). At the same time he taught from 1891 at the Sheffield Scientific School (SSS) of Yale University geology (as a representative of the sick James Dwight Dana ) and paleontology. He was a skilled taxidermist and in 1892 he worked with Charles Schuchert to prepare fossil starfish for the Chicago World's Fair . He became professor of historical geology (later palaeontology) at the SSS in 1897 and curator of the geological collection of the Peabody Museum in 1899, succeeding the late Marsh. He died of a heart attack in 1904. His successor at the Peabody Museum was his close friend Charles Schuchert.

He was President of the Connecticut Academy of Science from 1900 to 1902. In 1899 he became a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a corresponding member of the Geological Society of London .

He is known as a trilobite researcher, who particularly excavated in the place named after him ( Beecher's Trilobite Bed ) from the Ordovician in Cleveland's Glen, Oneida County, New York, with partially good soft tissue conservation through pyritization .

He was a leading exponent of neo- Lamarckism in the United States .

In 1899 he gave his own extremely extensive fossil collection (over 100,000 copies) to the Peabody Museum. Mostly it came from the Devonian and lower Carboniferous parts of Pennsylvania and New York.

He had been married since 1894 and had two daughters.

Publications

  • Ceratiocaridæ from the upper Devonian measures in Warren County ; Pub. by the Board of Commissioners for the Second Geological Survey, 1884 ( Online )
  • The development of some Silurian Brachiopoda ; University of the State of New York, 1889 ( online )
  • Outline of natural classification of the Trilobites ; 1897
  • Othniel Charles Marsh ; 1899
  • Studies in evolution ; C. Scribner, 1901 ( online )

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical Memoir by William Healey Dall (PDF; 709 kB)

literature

  • William Healy Dall: Biographical Memory of Charles Emerson Beecher, 1856-1904. Read Before the National Academy of Sciences, November 16, 1904
personal data
SURNAME Beecher, Charles Emerson
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH October 9, 1856
PLACE OF BIRTH Dunkirk (New York)
DATE OF DEATH February 14, 1904
Place of death New Haven (Connecticut)