Wendell P. Woodring

Wendell Phillips Woodring (13 June 1891, Reading, Pennsylvania – 29 January 1983, Santa Barbara, California) was an American paleontologist and geologist. He gained an international reputation for his research on invertebrate fossils of the Tertiary and in the stratigraphy of the Tertiary in California, Central America, and the Caribbean.^[1]

Biography

Wendell P. Woodring's father, James Daniel Woodring, was a minister in the

From 1927 to 1930 he spent three years as a professor of invertebrate paleontology at Caltech. There he became a close friend of Chester Stock, Ralph Daniel Reed (1889–1940), and Kenneth E. Lohman (who graduated from Caltech in 1929, was one of Woodring's undergraduate students, and became a leading expert on diatoms). In 1930 Woodring resigned from Caltech, because he greatly preferred field work to teaching.^[2]

In 1930 he returned to the USGS and from 1930 to 1932 mapped the

From the late 1940s onwards Woodring was particularly concerned with the geology of the Canal Zone in Panama and surrounding areas and research into the geological history of the land bridge between North and South America. He also described the Tertiary mollusc fauna starting in the Eocene, as well as the regional stratigraphy. He concluded that the land bridge opened at the turn of the Pliocene and Pleistocene, and faunal exchange of mammals peaked in the early Pleistocene.^[2]

From 1950 to 1953 he organized a conference on biochemistry, paleoecology, and evolution. The conference was held from the 9th to the 11th of June 1953 in Shelter Island, New York.^[5] In honor of Woodring's contributions to science, Preston Cloud and Philip Abelson organized the Woodring Conference on Major Biologic Innovations and the Geologic Record. The Woodring Conference, attended by twenty-three scientists from various disciplines, was held from the 14th to the 16th of June 1961 at Big Meadows Lodge, Virginia.^[6]

Woodring was elected a Fellow of the

Wendell and Josephine Woodring had two daughters, Julia Worth Woodring (1920–2005) and Jane Hurst Woodring (1922–1954). In 1944 their elder daughter married Robert Milton Armagast (1914–2005),[11] who became a professor of industrial arts at Adams State University in Colorado. Wendell P. Woodring, upon his death in 1983, was survived by his first daughter and three Armagast grandchildren.^[2][12] After his wife Josephine died in 1964, Wendell Woodring married in 1965 Merle Crisler Foshag, who died in 1977.^[2] She was known as a watercolorist and her first husband was William F. Foshag.^[13]

Eponyms

Selected publications

Articles

• How fossils got into rocks. The Scientific Monthly 23, 1926, pp. 337–345, published by the American Association for the Advancement of Science
• American Tertiary Molluscs of the genus Clementia, Shorter Contributions to General Geology, USGS, 1926, pp. 25– 47 abstract
  doi:10.3133/pp147C
• with M. N. Bramlette, Robert M. Kleinpell: Miocene stratigraphy and paleontology of Palos Verdes Hills, California. Am. Assoc. Pet. Geol. Bull. 20, 1936, pp. 125–159
• with S. N. Daviess: Geology and manganese deposits of Guisa-Los Negros area, Oriente province, Cuba. Geological Investigations in the American Republics, 1941-43, United States Government Printing Office, 1944, pp. 357–386
• Caribbean land and sea through the ages, Geolog. Soc. America Bulletin 65, 1954, pp. 719–732
  • Caribbean land and sea through the ages, in Preston Cloud (ed.), Adventures in Earth History, Freeman 1970, pp. 603–616 (reprint of 1954 article collected in "a volume of significant writings from original sources")
• The Panama land bridge as a sea barrier, American Philosophical Society Proc., 110, 1966, pp. 425–433

Books and monographs

• Woodring, Wendell Phillips; Brown, John S.; Burbank, Wilbur S. (1924). Geology of the Republic of Haiti. Port-au-Prince: Service Géologique, Haiti.
• ——— (1925). Miocene Mollusks from Bowden, Jamaica: Pelecypods and Scaphopods. Carnegie Institution of Washington.
  ISBN 9780598360151
  .
• ———; Roundy, Paul Vere; Farnsworth, Howard R. (1932). Geology and Oil Resources of the Elk Hills, California: Including Naval Petroleum Reserve No.1. U.S. Government Printing Office.
• ———; Stewart, Ralph Bentley; Richards, Ralph Webster (1940). Geology of the Kettleman Hills Oil Field, California: Stratigraphy, Paleontology, and Structure.
• ———; Bramlette, Milton Nunn; Kew, William Stephen Webster (1946). Geology and Paleontology of Palos Verdes Hills, California.
• ———; Bramlette, Milton Nunn (1950). Geology and Paleontology of the Santa Maria District, California (PDF).
• ——— (1957). Geology and Paleontology of Canal Zone and Adjoining Parts of Panama: Description of Tertiary Mollusks (Gastropods: Eulimidae, Marginellidae to Helminthoglyptidae) : A Contribution to the History of the Panama Land Bridge (PDF).

References