Frank M. Carpenter

Frank Morton Carpenter ( born September 6, 1902 in Boston, † January 18, 1994 in Lexington ( Massachusetts)) was an American paleontologist and entomologist. He was considered a leading expert on fossil insects.

Life

Carpenter was interested in since his youth for fossil insects. He studied from 1922 at Harvard University with a bachelor's degree summa cum laude in 1926, the master's degree in 1927 and his doctorate on fossil ants in North America with William Morton Wheeler in 1929. He was for 60 years curator of fossil insects at the Louis Agassiz Museum of Comparative Zoology, which he joined in 1931. First, he was an associate in Entomology, 1932 assistant curator in invertebrate paleontology, 1935 Instructor in Zoology in 1936 curator of fossil insects and assistant professor of paleontology and from 1945 Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology. In 1969 he became Professor Fisher for Natural History, and from 1973 he was professor emeritus, but did research on the museum as the honorary curator. He taught at Harvard entomology and paleontology. 1952 to 1959 he was Director of the Department of Biology.

One focus of his research were fossil insects from the Paleozoic (Permian, Carboniferous) and especially the Lower Permian of the reference of Elmo in Kansas, where he began collecting in 1925. Once there already Elias Howard Sellards and Carl O. Dunbar had collected extensively and the reference actually considered to be exhausted he found 2400 additional copies and 1932 he took a further approximately 2000 copies and 1939 several thousand more. He also collected from the Permian of Midco, Oklahoma and the Carboniferous of Mazon Creek in Illinois. He compared the North American Paleozoic insects with those from other parts of the world. He had this to Moscow especially good contacts. In addition to the Paleozoic, he also published, for example, on fossils of the Miocene of Florissant, Colorado, from Tertiary amber of the Baltic Sea region and from Canadian Cretaceous deposits.

He was the author of the tape insects in the Treatise of Invertebrate Paleontology, which reflects the state until 1983. He declined through his careful investigations, the number of extinct orders of insects from 50 to 9 erstbeschrieb He also in 1947 one of the best-known fossil insects, Meganeuropsis americana, with a wingspan of 29 inches of one of the largest known insect.

Several fossil species of insects are named after him. He was editor of the journal Psyche of the Cambridge Entomological Club, which he was president several times.

In 1975 he received the Paleontological Society Medal. In 1983 he became an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society. In 1993 he was awarded the Thomas Say Award from the Entomological Society of America. He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and from 1961 to 1963 as Vice President.

His older brother Edwin was an astronomer and director of the Astronomical Laboratory at the University of Arizona in Tucson.

Writings

• Superclass Hexapoda, Treatise of Invertebrate Paleontology, Volume 4 of Part R: Arthopoda 4, Geological Society of America 1992
• With CT Brues, AL Mellander Classification of Insects, 1954