Ermine Cowles Case

Ermine Cowles Case, usually cited EC Case, ( born September 11, 1871 in Kansas City, Missouri, † September 7, 1953 ) was an American vertebrate paleontologist.

Life and work

Case went to school in Kansas City, where his father was a doctor and was also a scientific interest as editor of the Western Review of Science and Industry. He studied at Kansas State University, where he earned his bachelor's (1893 ) and his master's degree (MA) and remained until 1895 as an assistant in chemistry. Already at the University of Kansas, he made first paleontological excavation in the badlands under the direction of SW Williston, with whom he also published a first work on mosasaurs in Kansas. In 1895 he received his Master of Science degree from Cornell University and in 1896 he was at the University of Chicago doctorate ( on fossil turtles from the Cretaceous of Kansas of the genus Protostega ).

He then taught ten years from 1897 to 1907 at the State Normal School in Milwaukee in the Department of Geology and Physical Geography. In 1903, he studied with a scholarship of the vertebrate fossils Carnegie Foundation in European museums. From 1907 until his retirement in 1941 he was a professor at the University of Michigan, where he was temporarily Board of the Faculty of Geology and Director of the Museum of Paleontology. First, he was Assistant Professor, Assistant Professor from 1909 to 1911 curator of the paleontological collections of the University. In 1912 he became a professor in 1921 as the successor to William Herbert Hobbs Director of the Museum of Paleontology of the University and from 1934 also as a successor of Hobbs Head of the Department of Geology.

1910 and 1922/23, he visited Europe, with a world tour to Africa, Australia and New Zealand joined the latter to stay. In 1925 he visited South America, and the 1937 International Geological Congress in Russia, where he attended and also Siberia after East Asia, Malaysia and Japan.

Case was one of the most important representatives of the second generation of American vertebrate paleontologist Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward after Drinker Cope and he contributed to the elucidation of the systematic classification ( and double nominations ) of the collated in the Bone Wars of Marsh and Cope finds at. In particular, but he was concerned since his time in Chicago with George Baur with early land vertebrates from the Permian and Carboniferous of North America ( as Pelycosauriern and Cotylosaurier, about which he wrote monographs at the Carnegie Institution ), which he in the red beds of Texas, New Mexico and Oklahoma excavated. He dug up in South Dakota also much in the Jurassic of Como Bluff (Wyoming ) in the Cretaceous of Kansas and in the Cenozoic of the Green River Basin and the Badlands. Among other things, he has published more than a mastodon Fund in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan and the discovery of Elephas primigenius americanus in glacial layers of Lake Mogodore ( Cass County, Michigan). He published some 180 scientific papers.

He increased not only (on regular expeditions in the summer months) the collections of the University, but was also an excellent teacher. An annual lecture at the University of Michigan, which houses the majority of its collections, is named in his honor ( Ermine Cowles Case Memorial Lecture ).

He was a member of the Michigan Academy of Arts and Sciences ( and 1912 its president ), the Washington Academy of Sciences, one of the first honorary members of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (1951 ), Fellow of the Geological Society of America and the Paleontological Society of America ( and 1929 its president ) and the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He was a Research Associate of the Carnegie Institution in Washington DC

He was since 1898 with Mary Margaret Snow, daughter of the first Chancellor of the University of Kansas, married, with whom he had two sons, one of whom was a doctor at the University Hospital in Chicago and a ( Francis H. Case) Professor of Chemistry at the Temple University.

Writings

• Wisconsin, its geology and physical geography. A popular account of the natural features and climate of the state for students and general readers, Milwaukee 1907 ( developed from his lectures )
• Processing of the sections amphibians, reptiles edited by Charles R. Eastman English edition of Karl Alfred von Zittel Broad Palaeontology ( Text -book of Paleontology, London, New York, Macmillan, 3 volumes, 1925-1927 )
• Revision of the Amphibia and Pisces of the Permian of North America, Carnegie Institution, Washington DC 1911
• Revision of the Cotylosauria of North America, Carnegie Institution, 1911
• Revision of Pelycosauria of North America, Carnegie Institution 1907
• The Permo - Carboniferous Red Reds of North America and Their Vertebrate Fauna, Carnegie Institution 1915
• The Environment of Vertebrate Life in the Late Paleozoic in North America, a paleographic study, Carnegie Institution 1919
• Environment of tetrapod Life in the Late Paleozoic of Regions Other than North America, Carnegie Institution 1926
• Catalogue of the type and figured specimens of vertebrate fossils in the Museum of Paleontology, University of Michigan, University of Michigan Press 1947
• The Dilemma of the paleontologist, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 1951