Horace Elmer Wood

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Horace Elmer Wood (born February 6, 1901 in Portland (Oregon) , † August 13, 1975 ) was an American vertebrate paleontologist.

Since his father was a captain in the US Navy, the family moved often and he grew up in various parts of the United States, Europe and Puerto Rico. He went to school in Washington DC, where he often visited the National Museum of Natural History , and in Brooklyn and studied geology and paleontology from 1917 at Princeton University with a bachelor's degree in 1921 and then with William K. Gregory at Columbia University from which he received his doctorate in 1927. He was also a college teacher. In 1931 he went to Dana College in Newark (New Jersey) , where he built up the biology faculty (later part of Rutgers University ) and was a professor of paleontology. In 1959 he took early retirement due to eye problems. He worked with the American Museum of Natural History.

He dealt mainly with fossil rhinos and tapirs, where he introduced the suborder Ceratomorpha in 1937, which included them (see Unpaarhufer ). For example, he undertook excavations in the Big Badlands of South Dakota (White River Group from the Oligocene ) in the 1920s , then expanded to other areas of the USA and Canada. He also became an expert in stratigraphy of these tertiary layers in the USA with the help of mammalian fossils. From 1938 he was a committee of the vertebrate department of the Paleontological Society that dealt with such stratigraphic questions. The committee's report (Wood Report) was published in 1941 by the Geological Society of America.

1956/57 he was President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and 1939/40 Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences. He was a fellow of the Geological Society of America.

His brother Albert E. Wood was also a vertebrate paleontologist.

Fonts

  • Some early tertiary rhinoceroses and hyracodonts, Bull. Am. Paleontology, 13, 1927, No. 50, 1-105
  • Revision of the Hyrachidae: Am. Mus. Nat. Hist. Bulletin 67, 1934, 181-295
  • Patterns of evolution, New York Acad. Sci. Transactions, Ser. 2, Volume 16, 1954, 324-336

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ He wrote to Horace Elmer Wood, 2nd
  2. ↑ Wood et al. a., Nomenclature and correlation of the North American Continental Tertiary, Geol. Soc. America Bull., Vol. 52, 1941, pp. 1-48
personal data
SURNAME Wood, Horace Elmer
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH February 6, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Portland, Oregon
DATE OF DEATH August 13, 1975