Frank M. Carpenter
Frank Morton Carpenter (born September 6, 1902 in Boston , † January 18, 1994 in Lexington (Massachusetts) ) was an American paleontologist and entomologist . He was considered a leading expert on fossil insects.
Life
Carpenter has been interested in fossil insects since his youth. He studied from 1922 at Harvard University with a bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1926, a master's degree in 1927 and a doctorate on fossil ants in North America with William Morton Wheeler in 1929. He was curator for fossil insects at the Louis Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology for 60 years , which he joined in 1931. First he was Associate in Entomology, 1932 Assistant Curator in Invertebrate Paleontology, 1935 Instructor in Zoology, 1936 Curator of Fossil Insects and Assistant Professor of Paleontology and from 1945 Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology. In 1969 he became Fisher Professor for Natural History and from 1973 he was Professor Emeritus, but continued to conduct research at the museum as an honorary curator. He taught entomology and paleontology at Harvard. 1952 to 1959 he was head of the Faculty of Biology.
A focus of his research were fossil insects from the Paleozoic (Permian, Carboniferous) and especially the lower Permian from the Elmo site in Kansas, where he began collecting from 1925. After Elias Howard Sellards and Carl O. Dunbar had already collected extensively there and the site was actually considered exhausted, he found 2400 more specimens and in 1932 he found around 2000 more copies and in 1939 several thousand more. He also collected from the Permian from Midco in Oklahoma and the Carboniferous from Mazon Creek in Illinois. He compared the North American Paleozoic insects with those from other parts of the world. He had particularly good contacts in Moscow. In addition to the Paleozoic, he also published, for example, on fossils of the Miocene from Florissant in Colorado and from Tertiary amber from the Baltic Sea region and from Canadian chalk deposits.
He was the author of the volume insects in the Treatise of Invertebrate Paleontology, which reproduces the status up to 1983. Through his careful investigations, he reduced the number of extinct insect orders from 50 to 9. In 1947 he also described one of the most famous fossil insects, Meganeuropsis americana, with a wingspan of 29 inches, one of the largest known insects.
Several fossil insect species are named after him. He was editor of the Cambridge Entomological Club's Psyche magazine, of which he was president several times.
In 1975 he received the Paleontological Society Medal . In 1983 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society . In 1993 he received the Thomas Say Award from the Entomological Society of America . He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1933 and its Vice President from 1961 to 1963.
His older brother Edwin was an astronomer and director of the Astronomical Laboratory at the University of Arizona at Tucson.
Fonts
- Superclass Hexapoda , Treatise of Invertebrate Paleontology, Volume 4 of Part R: Arthopoda 4, Geological Society of America 1992
- with CT Brues, AL Mellander Classification of Insects , 1954
literature
- Liz Brosius in The Collector, February 1995.
- David G. Furth, Psyche, Volume 101, 1994, 127-144 (with bibliography).
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Carpenter, Frank M. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Carpenter, Frank Morton (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American paleontologist and entomologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 6, 1902 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Boston |
| DATE OF DEATH | January 18, 1994 |
| Place of death | Lexington, Massachusetts |