Farish Jenkins
Farish Alston Jenkins | |
---|---|
Born | 19 May 1940 |
Died | 11 November 2012 | (aged 72)
Alma mater | Princeton University |
Awards | Romer-Simpson Medal (2009) |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Harvard University Columbia University |
Thesis | The Postcranial Skeleton of African Cynodonts and Problems in the Evolution of Mammalian Postcranial Anatomy (1969) |
Farish Alston Jenkins (May 19, 1940 – November 11, 2012) was a professor at
Early life
Farish Jenkins was born in Manhattan on May 19, 1940.[5] He was the oldest of three sons of a marketing executive but was raised by his grandmother in Colorado while his father served in World War II.[5][6]
While he was a student at Princeton, studying geology, Jenkins met Eleanor Tracy. He later married her and they had two children — Henry Edgar and Katherine Temperance.[6] He obtained a master's and doctorate from Yale and served as a captain in the United States Marine Corps.
As a graduate student at Yale, Jenkins took a trip to
Academic career
He went on to teach at both Columbia and Harvard. In his later life, Jenkins served at Harvard as a professor of biology, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Jenkins made numerous expeditions to the Arctic, including a dozen expeditions to the Triassic of Jameson Land in Greenland, and to other sites from East Africa to Wyoming. He is credited as having helped explain the fish-to-tetrapod evolutionary transition as he helped discover the 375 million year old Tiktaalik roseae.[7]
Jenkins was known for his eccentricity as a professor. When lecturing on the subject of gait, he would illustrate this by walking on a peg leg as the character Captain Ahab from Herman Melville's Moby Dick. When on expedition, he would dress in the dashing style of Indiana Jones and carry a high-powered rifle.[citation needed]
He used
After being diagnosed with cancer, he said "as a paleontologist, I'm familiar with extinction."[citation needed] He died from pneumonia at Brigham and Women's Hospital on November 11, 2012.
References
- PMID 23222601.
- ^ a b "Farish Jenkins", The Economist, p. 98, November 17, 2012
- PMID 24449831.
- ^ Johnson, Carolyn Y. (2014-01-13). "Discovery provides insight into origin of limbs". Science. The Boston Globe. Boson, MA: Boston Globe Media Partners, LLC. Retrieved 2014-01-13.
- ^ a b Douglas Martin (November 30, 2012), "Farish Jenkins, Expert on Evolving Fossils, Dies at 72", The New York Times
- ^ a b c Karen Weintraub (November 14, 2012), "Farish Jenkins, paleontologist, Harvard teacher", The Boston Globe
- S2CID 4411801.