Charles Schuchert

Charles Schuchert was an American invertebrate paleontologist born July 3, 1858, in Cincinnati, Ohio, who died November 20, 1942, in New Haven, Connecticut, and who became a leader in the development of paleogeography, the study of the distribution of lands and seas in the geological past, and coined the term paleobiology in 1904; his major works include A Synopsis of American Fossil Brachiopoda in 1897, Paleogeography of North America in 1909, Revision of Paleozoic Stelleroidea in 1915, a Textbook of Geology in 1924, and Historical Geology of North America published in installments from 1935 to 1943. He served as a preparator at Yale University from 1892 to 1893, worked for the United States Geological Survey from 1893 to 1894, was curator at the United States National Museum from 1894 to 1904, and directed the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale from 1904 to 1923. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1910, served as the first president of the Paleontological Society in 1910 and as president of the Geological Society of America in 1922, won the Hayden Memorial Geological Award in 1929 and the Mary Clark Thompson Medal in 1934, and received the Penrose Medal in 1934.