PRESENTATION OF THE PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY MEDAL TO ARTHUR J. BOUCOT

Abstract

The annual presentation of the Society's Medal is a major event. This year's medalist is known worldwide to most in the profession, at least by reputation. There are doubtless few who have not encountered either the man—an inveterate attender of national and international meetings and congresses—or one or more of his numerous publications. Few actively engaged in work with brachiopods or with Silurian-Devonian biostratigraphy and paleoecology have not collaborated with him over the years or encountered him during his peripatetic field work wherever there is a Silurian-Devonian outcrop. Boucot came from a Philadelphia family that valued academic and professional achievement, and with the encouragement received as a child from his mother, one might have predicted his ultimate contributions to paleontology and evolution. When he was very young, his mother took an elementary geology course at the Wagner Free Institute of Science and encouraged his interest in geology. At the age of five Boucot collected and recognized from a picture in his mother's textbook a brachiopod that turned out to be a Late Devonian spiriferid. During a year at Pennsylvania State College, where his mother was completing her premedical requirements and Art was about 10, he was encouraged in fossil collecting by Frank M. Schwartz and in mineral collecting by Arthur Honess. From 1935 through 1938 he took an elementary course in Physical and Historical Geology, taught by Benjamin F. Howell, at the Wagner Free Institute of Science (his “diploma” hangs on his office wall). Despite a promising beginning, Art was a freshman dropout from the University of Pennsylvania who went to work as a crystal finisher for RCA in 1942. A childhood enthusiasm for mineralogy had been encouraged by Samuel G. Gordon, curator of the mineral collection at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences. Appropriately, Boucot's first published papers were …