Ermine Cowles Case

Ermine Cowles Case , mostly cited EC Case, (born September 11, 1871 in Kansas City , Missouri , † September 7, 1953 ) was an American vertebrate paleontologist .

life and work

Case went to school in Kansas City, where his father was a doctor and also had an interest in science as the editor of the Western Review of Science and Industry . He studied at Kansas State University , where he received his bachelor's (1893) and master's (MA) degrees and remained as an assistant in chemistry until 1895. Already at the University of Kansas he undertook the first paleontological excavations in the badlands under the direction of SW Williston, with whom he also published a first paper on mosasaurs in Kansas . In 1895 he made his Masters of Science degree from Cornell University and in 1896 he received his PhD from the University of Chicago (on fossil sea turtles from the Cretaceous Kansas of the genus Protostega).

He then taught for ten years from 1897 to 1907 at the State Normal School in Milwaukee in the Faculty of Geology and Physical Geography. In 1903 he studied vertebrate fossils in European museums with a grant from the Carnegie Foundation . From 1907 until his retirement in 1941 he was a professor at the University of Michigan , where he was temporarily director of the Faculty of Geology and director of the Museum of Paleontology. At first he was assistant professor , from 1909 junior professor and in 1911 curator of the university's paleontological collections. In 1912 he became a professor and in 1921, as successor to William Herbert Hobbs, director of the University's Museum of Paleontology and, from 1934, also as successor to Hobbs, head of the Faculty of Geology.

In 1910 and 1922/23 he visited Europe, the latter being followed by a world tour to Africa, Australia and New Zealand. In 1925 he visited South America and in 1937 the International Geological Congress in Russia, where he also visited Siberia and then East Asia, Malaysia and Japan.

Case was one of the most important representatives of the second generation of American vertebrate palaeontologists after Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope and he contributed to the elucidation of the systematic classification (and double naming) of the findings brought together by Marsh and Cope in the Bone Wars . In particular, since his time in Chicago with George Baur, he dealt with early terrestrial vertebrates from the Permian and Carboniferous North America (such as pelycosaurs and cotylosaurs , about which he wrote monographs at the Carnegie Institution), which he lived in the Red Beds of Texas , New Mexico and excavated Oklahoma . He dug a lot in the Jura of Como Bluff ( Wyoming ), in the chalk of Kansas and Cenozoic of the Green River Basin and the Badlands in South Dakota from. Among other things, he published about a mastodon find in the Bloomfield Hills in Michigan and the find of Elephas primigenius americanus in glacial layers of Lake Mogodore ( Cass County , Michigan). He published around 180 scientific papers.

He not only increased the collections of the university (on regular expeditions in the summer months), but was also considered an excellent teacher. An annual lecture at the University of Michigan, which houses the majority of his collections, is named in his honor (Ermine Cowles Case Memorial Lecture).

He was a member of the Michigan Academy of Arts and Sciences (and its President in 1912), the Washington Academy of Sciences , the American Philosophical Society , one of the first honorary members of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (1951), Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the Paleontological Society of America (and its President in 1929) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . He was a Research Associate at the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC

He was married since 1898 to Mary Margaret Snow, daughter of the first chancellor of the University of Kansas, with whom he had two sons, one of whom was a doctor at the University Hospital in Chicago and one ( Francis H. Case ) professor of chemistry at Temple University.

Fonts

• Wisconsin, its geology and physical geography. A popular account of the natural features and climate of the state for students and general readers , Milwaukee 1907 (derived from his lectures)
• Editing of the sections amphibians, reptiles in the English edition of Karl Alfred von Zittel, published by Charles R. Eastman, Basics of Paleontology ( Text-book of Paleontology , London, New York, Macmillan, 3 volumes, 1925–1927)
• Revision of the Amphibia and Pisces of the Permian of North America, Carnegie Institution , Washington DC 1911
• Revision of the Cotylosauria of North America , Carnegie Institution, 1911
• Revision of Pelycosauria of North America , Carnegie Institution 1907
• The Permo-Carboniferous Red Reds of North America and their Vertebrate Fauna , Carnegie Institution 1915
• The Environment of Vertebrate Life in the Late Paleozoic in North America, a paleographic study , Carnegie Institution 1919
• Environment of Tetrapod Life in the Late Paleozoic of Regions Other than North America , Carnegie Institution 1926
• Catalog of the type and figured specimens of vertebrate fossils in the Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan , University of Michigan Press 1947
• The Dilemma of the paleontologist , University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1951

Web links

• Brief appreciation from Robert Dott, Ermine Cowles Case- Turn of the century master of permo-carboniferous terrestrial life , 2005 Salt Lake City Annual Meeting GSA, Abstract
• Biography and photo at the University of Michigan

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data from Memorial at the University of Michigan by Ruthven, Kellum, Goddard.
2. ^ On the osteology and relationships of Protostega , Boston, Ginn and Company 1897
3. ^ Member History: Ermine Cowles Case. American Philosophical Society, accessed May 31, 2018 .