Samuel Almond Miller

(1837-1897)

Miller was a lawyer and amateur paleontologist who was born in Ohio in 1837. He described many fossils from the Paleozoic of North America and authored several major compendia of North American fossils, including "North American Geology and Paleontology" (1889).

Charles Schuchert

(1858-1942)

Schuchert was a prominent paleontologist originally from Cincinnati Ohio. As a geologist he was largely self-educated and started his career illustrating fossils for early geological surveys. He later worked as a preparator at Yale University, then worked at the US Geological Survey before joining the faculty at Yale, where he remained the rest of his career. He was president of the Geological Society of America (1922). The Schuchert Award is given by the Paleontological Society in his honor to a person under 40 whose work reflects excellence and promise in the field.

August Frederic Foerste

(1862-1936)

Foerste was born in Dayton, Ohio where he spent most of his life as a high school teacher. He was educated at Denison University (BA, 1887) and Harvard (MA, 1888; PhD, 1890). Before returning to Ohio in 1893 he worked for the USGS studying stratigraphy in New England and studied briefly at Heidelberg University in Germany. Foerste participated in early geological surveys of Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky and Canada. He is known for his work on Ordovician fossils from the Cincinnati Arch, as well as other North American Paleozoic faunas.

Edgar Roscoe Cumings

(1874-1967)

Edgar Roscoe Cumings was a long-time chair of the Geology Department of Indiana University from 1904 to 1942. He arrived at IU in 1898, after doing graduate work at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. He later took a leave of absence to obtain his Ph.D. from Yale University in 1903. He and his students studied the paleontology of Indiana and began building the IU Paleontology Collection in earnest. Cumings notably led work on the Cincinnatian (Late Ordovician) of Indiana, the Silurian reefs in the northern part of the state, and on the fauna of the Salem Limestone. Cumings was originally from Ohio and was married to Frances L. Cumings, originally of Pennsylvanian. They had two children, Edith K. and Edgar C. Cumings.

Ray S. Bassler

(1878-1961)

Bassler was a paleontologist who worked with Charles Schuchert, Carl Rominger, and Edward Ulrich while he was growing up in Cincinnati. He later obtained degrees from University of Cincinnati (MA, 1903) and George Washington University (PhD 1905). Most of his career was spent at the US national Museum (Smithsonian Institute) where he was a curator in Paleontology and head curator of Geology.

Jesse James Galloway

(1882-1962)

Galloway was a Hoosier paleontologist educated at Indiana University and is noted for having received the first PhD in Geology awarded there in 1913. Galloway studied with E.R. Cumings, first on the Indiana Ordovician sections of the Cincinnati Arch, notably the section exposed in the railway cutting at Tanners Creek, and later on atrata from the rest of the state. Galloway was a pioneer in stratigraphic and industrial applications of micropaleontology and taught the first courses in micropaleontology and petroleum geology at IU.

Charles Frederick Deiss

(1903-1959)

Charles Deiss was a paleontologist and geologist who was born in Kentucky and studied at Miami University of Ohio (BA, 1925). In 1946 he moved to Bloomington, Indiana to become chair of the Department of Geological Sciences and the Indiana State Geologist. Deiss was instrumental in establishing the IU Field Station near Whitehall Montana and he collected many fossils from the Paleozoic sections in that region. He is especially known for his work on Cambrian faunas and stratigraphy from western North America.

Handouts Technical Terms

 

Dr. P. David Polly

Department of Geological Sciences
Indiana University
1001 E. 10th Street
Bloomington, IN 47405
pdpolly@indiana.edu
Website