Charles Schuchert
Charles Schuchert ( born July 3, 1858 in Cincinnati, Ohio, † November 20, 1942 in New Haven, Connecticut) was an American paleontologist, who contributed a leader in the development of paleogeography, the study of the distribution of land and sea in the geological past. Schuchert 1904 coined the term Paleobiology.
Scientific career
During the 1880s earned Schuchert, who had never enjoyed a scientific training, but for a long time had worked in the carpentry workshop of his father, together with his friend Edward Oscar Ulrich his money by drawing illustrations for scientific publications of various geological services, while each leisure used to to increase his ever-growing collection of fossils. 1889 James Hall offered him a job in Albany. After Schucherts this statement was probably not so much to his technical skills, but rather to its fine collection of Brachiopden: Hall was known that he took for the rights to use outstanding palaeontological collections of the strangest detours. Schuchert the right to publish scientific work was accordingly initially not granted, and Fuller published early 90s along with John Mason Clarke, at the Schuchert had no small share the work An Introduction to the Study of the Genera of Paleozoic Brachiopoda.
Following the work on this publication finally Schuchert could still be working as a writer, and did so with a thesis on the brachiopods of Minnesota. In 1893 he took a job with the United States Geological Survey and became an assistant to Charles D. Walcott, chief paleontologist of the survey to be parked only a short time later to the Peabody Museum at Yale University to Charles Emerson Beecher, whom he in the evaluation of the Marsh collection helped, a collection of unterkarbonischen crinoids from Indiana. Beecher made him familiar with the broad and overarching perspective that characterized Schucherts work later.
After Schuchert in the years was 1894-1904 Assistant Curator of Invertebrates of the National Museum of Natural History, he moved to Yale University, proceeding to take up the succession of Charles E. Beecher, the late this year, the first Yale professor for the Paleontology of the invertebrates. The position at Yale University brought it about that he was a professor of paleontology and historical geology at the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University at the same time. Under Schucherts students are Percy Edward Raymond, William Henry Twenhofel and Carl Owen Dunbar mentioned. The teaching of young, less- familiar with the matter forced the students used to the academic operation of the Museum Schuchert to undergo a sometimes painful transformation. To give the students an overview of the varied conditions of land and sea in the Paleozoic America, he began with the design of paleogeographic maps, a task that occupy him the rest of his life and should result in a work of more than 150 such cards.
After the head of the Geology Department at the Sheffield School, he was born in 1909, and 1918/1919 the chairman of this department at Yale University itself, he retired in 1921 from teaching and administrative service back to devote himself to his studies. For a time he was still Profeesor and Curator Emeritus, but in 1926 he gave up all offices. Exempt from all obligations, he has published numerous scientific papers in the next two decades. From its central theme, the brachiopods, he turned to, among others, the study of the fossil record in connection with the then valid Geosynklinal theory, which he was able to help with many details. His crowning life's work on the geological history of North America, he could not finish, of the planned three volumes of the Historical Geology of North America, only two were published before he died in 1942, the third remained unpublished.
Honors and Awards
Schuchert in 1910 was elected president of the Paleontological Society, 1911 to the National Academy of Sciences in 1922 and as President of the Geological Society of America. He was a member of scientific associations in Belgium, China, Germany, England, Norway, Austria, Russia and Sweden. In addition to other prizes, he was in 1934 awarded the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America. According to him, the Charles Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society is named.