Glenn Lowell Jepsen

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Glenn Lowell Jepsen (born March 4, 1903 in Lead (South Dakota) , † October 5, 1974 in Princeton (New Jersey) ) was an American vertebrate paleontologist and director of the Princeton Museum of Natural History .

Jepsen grew up in Rapid City and studied for a year at the University of Michigan before teaching English at the School of Mines in Rapid City and taking further courses there. After he happened to meet the paleontologist and geologist William John Sinclair (1877-1935), he followed him to Princeton and befriended him. In 1927 he earned his bachelor's degree in geology at Princeton and took part in a first field expedition to Wyoming (Big Horn Basin). As a student he published about the then oldest known cat ( Hoplophoneus oharrai from the Oligocene of the Badlands of South Dakota, where he collected many early mammalian fossils). In 1930 he received his doctorate from Sinclair in Princeton, became an instructor in 1931, a curator of vertebrate paleontology in 1936, assistant professor in 1934, associate professor in 1940 and the first Sinclair professor of vertebrate paleontology in 1946 . Sinclair himself, a professor at Princeton since 1930, had died in 1935 and left an endowed professorship from his fortune as a petroleum geologist. From 1936 until his retirement in 1971, Jepsen was director of the Princeton Natural History Museum. He led many field expeditions.

In particular, he collected mammalian fossils from the Paleocene of Wyoming ( Polecat Bench Formation near Powell, Wyoming , which he discovered and named in the 1920s), studied the mammalian revolution in the Paleocene and biostratigraphy of the North American non-marine Tertiary, following his teacher Sinclair . Polecat Bench became the best-researched formation in relation to early mammalian development in the Paleocene through its collecting activity.

In 1966 he described in Science the oldest known bat ( Icaronycteris index ) from the Eocene of the Green River Formation in southwestern Wyoming. He prepared the fossil himself with meticulous laborious work.

In 1962 he received the Addison Emery Verrill Medal . 1955/56 he was Vice President of the Paleontological Society and 1944/45 President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology . He was a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Philosophical Society . He was a Fellow of the Geological Society of America and its Councilor from 1951 to 1954.

He was interested in the interdisciplinary collaboration of paleontology with evolutionary theory and genetics and was co-organizer of a corresponding conference in Princeton on the occasion of the 200th anniversary, from which a well-known conference proceedings emerged.

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SURNAME Jepsen, Glenn Lowell
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 4, 1903
PLACE OF BIRTH Lead (South Dakota)
DATE OF DEATH October 15, 1974
Place of death Princeton, New Jersey