Nelson Horatio Darton

Nelson Horatio Darton was an American geologist born December 17, 1865, in Brooklyn, New York, who died February 28, 1948, in Washington, D.C., and who worked as an expert in geological photography and geological map making and as a hydrogeologist, producing paleontological discoveries and specializing in groundwater studies across the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains; his publications include professional papers on the geology of the Black Hills and Bighorn Mountains, on the underground water resources of the central Great Plains between 1905 and 1909, and a 1917 pamphlet on the geology of the Grand Canyon. He began working as a chemist in his uncle drug business at age thirteen, was hired by the United States Geological Survey in 1886, and remained scientifically active there, retiring formally in 1936 but keeping an office at the Survey until his death, over a career that produced more than two hundred publications. He received the Penrose Medal in 1940.