Charles Emerson Beecher

This post is devoted one of the Peabody Museum's illustrious progenitors, Charles Emerson Beecher. He was born in Dunkirk, NY in 1856. While the geographic setting of one's hometown does not always destine one to a particular career path, it may well have affected Charles Beecher's future.


For those of you not familiar with Dunkirk, NY I will provide this brief introduction. Dunkirk (located in SW NY) is the type locality for the Dunkirk Shale Member of the Perrysburg Formation, Canadaway Group. Still not ringing any bells? Conoodonts? Oil shales? Arthrodires? Anyways, the Dunkirk is one of New York states many Devonian formations. While not as fossiliferous as some of the others, it still may have been enough to start Beecher down the path that would lead him to paleontological greatness.

Beecher began collecting fossils as a youth and had amassed quite a collection by the time he headed off to college at the University of Michigan. After getting his B.S. in 1878 he began working for James Hall at the New York State Museum in Albany. During his time in Albany, Beecher began studying and publishing on a number of different groups including recent molluscs, early spiders and shrimp.  Shortly before leaving Albany he donated his collection (which had by then grown to about twenty thousand specimens) to the NYSM.

Othniel Marsh persuaded Beecher to come down to New Haven and oversee the Peabody Museum's invertebrate collection in 1888. He continued his studies here and was awarded a Ph.D. after his extensive work with the brachiospongiids. He proceeded to conduct extensive research and teach classes at the Sheffield Scientific School and Yale University until Marsh's death in 1899. At this point, he took over as the curator for the geological collections. It was Charles Beecher who helped arrange the mounting of the Brontosaurus that currently resides in our great hall.

It was also in 1899 that Beecher donated his collection of fossils (all amassed after his previous donation to the NYSM) to the Peabody Museum, "in grateful recognition of the honors and favors conferred upon [him] during [his] connection with the University." This particular collection contained over one hundred thousand specimens, and it included several hundred types. (I'll discuss the philosophy of types in a later post).

It wasn't until 1893, however, that an event occurred for which Beecher is still well known. W. S. Valiant discovered a very thin layer of rock in the Utica Formation in which trilobites and their soft parts (legs, antennae, etc) were preserved in pyrite. He invited Beecher to have a look. Beecher studied these pyritized trilobites extensively, and he wrote fifteen papers on trilobite classification, morphologies and diversity following this discovery. He was working on an extensive treatise of trilobite classification when he was unexpectedly killed by "an affection of the heart."

His tragically early death cut short a promising career and a brilliant intellect.

The importance of localities

Fossils have little scientific meaning if they arrive in a collection with no information. Identifications can be made at any point in time. Photographs can be taken, accession lots can be assigned. If no locality information has been gathered or retained, then the fossil is often nothing more than a pretty specimen. If there are any fossil collectors out there reading this, I beg you - please note where your specimen is from stratigraphically and geographically. Even if you are not sure of the exact unit, note the lithology. Is the rock grey, black or brown? Is it hard like a limestone or does it break apart more easily like a shale? Where in the world is your rock from? A city or town is a good place to start, but try to be more specific. If you have a GPS unit, use it (but be sure to note the datum and uncertainty contained within your unit). If you don't have a GPS unit, don't despair! Try marking out your fossil locality on a USGS 7.5" topographic map. You can download them here. Using businesses as landmarks can get complicated because businesses come and go. If you want to use buildings as landmarks, use buildings that will be around for some time (and will be plotted on maps) like the courthouse or town hall. Note when the specimens were collected as well. Town hall may be in a different place fifty years from now, but if the specimen was collected on a known date, the location of the town hall at that time can be determined.
Having delivered my collecting tips for the week, I leave you with some photos of specimens with some (although definitely not the best) locality information.

Clionid sponges

A number of modern and fossil sponges made their homes inside the shells of other organisms. Rather than taking an empty gastropod (snail) shell like a hermit crab, these sponges literally move into a shell. Clionid sponges use a combination of physical and chemical abrasion to create openings in shells. They then spread out throughout the internal structure of the shell to create an extended home for themselves. I often imagined these sponges waiting until an organism dies to create the network of galleries, but it seems this isn't always the case. A detailed study published in 2005 by Stefaniak et al. in the Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology examined the effects of clionid borings on living Littorina snails. They found that the snails reacted to the invading sponges by thickening the interior lining of their shell (thus reducing their living space). In addition, the shells were much weaker structurally after the sponges bored out their galleries.

YPM 11323

To get an idea of what these sponges do, here's a pectinid bivalve that has been extensively bored by clionid sponges. Since these borings occur on both the interior and the exterior of the valve, this pectinid was likely dead prior to the borings (at least on the inside).


While this may not seem particularly damaging at a glance, a look at the cross-section of another bored shell shows what is really going on. Much of the structural integrity has been worn away by the sponges relentless chemical and physical attack. On the plus side, though, the sponges get a safe home in a nice hard substrate.

YPM 11324

A prominent early dealer

August Krantz began his fossil shop in Freiburg, Germany in 1833. Through personal relationships with important scientists and collectors of the day, August Krantz amassed a sizable and diverse collection of fossils. 

Friedrich Krantz (pictured - photo from the Krantz website) was well-known to fossil collectors and museums alike throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. He took over as head of the Krantz fossil and mineral firm in 1891. He sold specimens to many institutions including the Yale Peabody Museum, Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology, and the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian).

Dr. Krantz developed numerous special collections of fossils that were used around the world as teaching aids. Dr. Krantz and his employees traveled the world scouting out interesting localities and collecting fossils to replenish the firm's stores.

Many of the specimens in the Peabody's collection where obtained by Charles Schuchert (an early curator who I will discuss in detail in another post). The "Krantz" specimens are all marked with a small green sticker bearing a handwritten number. This number corresponds to a catalog that was included in the shipment.

The Krantz mineral and fossil firm is still in business and can be found here. Today the firm carries a wide array of fossil material and fossil casts, and it is still used by personal collectors and large institutions.

More about labels

One of the best things about working with a collection that has such a historic past is getting to know the people who have worked on it in the past. Many of our early collectors and curators have taken on personalities to me even though they've been dead for one hundred years. My main link to these pioneers of American geology and paleontology comes through their fossils.

Our first curator in Invertebrate Paleontology here at the Yale Peabody Museum was Charles Beecher. He had an extensive personal collection of fossils, but all were carefully labeled with a little dab of blue paint and a specimen number written in red. We have his original catalog, so whenever I come across one of his specimens i can flip through the pages (from the 1880s) and find exactly where he collected this fossil. Just in case you're wondering, this is a specimen of Megakozlowskiella perlamellosa (revised from Beecher's original designation of Spirifera perlamellosa) collected in Clarksville, New York from the lower Helderberg Group.

I'll have more from our early collectors and some early dealers in future posts.

Tracking Information

One thing I never fully appreciated before this job was the way specimens are labeled. Specimens may become dissociated from their original field labels; paper labels can be eaten by silverfish and bookworms; floods can make ink run; fires can destroy everything. I have become accustomed to a variety of different labeling techniques over the last four years, and today I want to share some of these.

Some times localities are written directly on specimens. A great thing about this method is that the locality information is retained even if the paper label is lost. One problem is that these types of things are often not very specific.
Take this coral for example. It is from Gothland (or Gotland). Gotland is an island off the coast of Sweden. It is particularly well known for its Silurian fossils. It is also over 3000 square kilometers.


Some times extensive information is inscribed directly on the fossil. This bivalve has been inscribed with its name, locality and provenance. All of this information is still legible too (which doesn't always happen when things are written in pencil).


Lesson to be learned to today: take copious notes. You may think it is too much information, but any clue can be helpful in determining where a fossil came from, and how it arrived at the museum. While writing on a specimen is often impossible, adding at least a town name (or an island) can be helpful in narrowing down the original locality. Write everything down in a notebook as well. When you donate your collection to the museum, give them your notebook too. We'll promise to keep it away from the book lice!

Strophalosia tenuispina, my first photograph

I thought it fitting to begin this blog with one of my earliest specimens here at the Peabody Museum. This is the very first photograph of a brachiopod that I took. It was part of a three year NSF-funded project to digitize many of our specimens. This is a Strophalosia tenuispina from the Baral Nala, SW of Amb in the Salt Range Mountains of Pakistan. It is Permian in age. The strophalosiids were commonly attached to hard substrates, either by cementing one valve directly to the substrate or wrapping their spines around it.