John Campbell Merriam

John Campbell Merriam (born October 20, 1869 in Hopkinton , Iowa , † October 30, 1945 in Oakland (California) ) was an American paleontologist. He was a professor at the University of California, Berkeley .

Life

The son of a shopkeeper and postmaster, Merriam was a fossil collector when he was young. His brother Charles Edward Merriam became a political scientist in Chicago. Merriam attended Lenox College with a bachelor's degree and studied geology and botany at the University of California, Berkeley (where Joseph LeConte was his teacher), and paleontology at the University of Munich with Karl Alfred von Zittel , where he did his doctorate on marine Mesozoic reptiles (On the Kansas Chalk Pythonomorphs, published in Palaeontographica 41, 1894, 1-39). After returning in 1894, he became a paleontologist at Berkeley, first instructor, later professor. He found a patroness in Annie Montague Alexander , who financed and participated in his excavations at Fossil Lake, Oregon (1901), Mount Shasta, and ichthyosaur excavations in the West Humboldt Range, Nevada (1905). In 1912 he received the chair of paleontology at Berkeley. He became particularly well-known for working on the mammals found in the tar pits of La Brea , especially the Smilodon . In 1920 he became President of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC. In 1938 he retired.

In addition to La Brea, he worked extensively on the John Day Basin fossil site in Oregon. He dealt with both invertebrates (e.g. tertiary mollusks in Vancouver Island ) and vertebrate paleontology.

He was also active as a conservationist and in 1918 co-founded a society for the protection of sequoias in California (Save the Redwoods League). He was also active in Washington at the Carnegie Institution on issues relating to nature conservation and national parks. He also published philosophical books and was a founding member of the Galton Society, which was active in eugenics .

Merriam was a member of the National Academy of Sciences , the American Philosophical Society, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1921). He was President of the Geological Society of America in 1919, the Paleontological Society in 1910 and the American Society of Naturalists in 1936 . He was multiple honorary doctorates.

Fonts

• Preliminary note on a new marine reptile from the Middle Triassic of Nevada. Bulletin of the Department of Geology at the University of California 5.5, 1906, pp. 75-79
• The skull and dentition of a primitive ichthyosaurian from the Middle Triassic. University of California Publications, Bulletin of the Department of Geology at the University of California 5, 24, 1910, pp. 381-390
• The living past , Scribner 1930
• The garment of God , Scribner 1943

literature

• Chester Stock: Obituary at the National Academy of Sciences, pdf

Web links

• Literature by and about John Campbell Merriam in the WorldCat bibliographic database