Botanical Museum Leaflets 



Summer I9K5 



Vol. 30, No. 3 



ELSO STERRENBERG BARGHOORN 1915-1984 



AN APPRECIATION 



Rkf-d C. Rollins 



Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn, Fisher Professor of Natural His- 

 tory, Harvard University, Cambridge, died of undetermined 

 natural causes at his home in Carlyle, Massachusetts, January 

 22, 1984. He was born in New York City on June 30, 1915, and 

 spent most of his early life in Dayton, Ohio. 



Barghoorn was a paleobotanist of considerable international 

 stature who brought to the subject a multifaceted approach. He 

 led away from the traditional field that had developed on the 

 borderline between botany and geology, that concerned itself 

 largely with the description of fossil plants and fossil floras, and 

 too often oriented to aid geologists in the study of stratigraphic 

 sequences and correlations. His interests and contributions 

 ranged widely to include techniques of experimentation as well 

 as historical and observational methods of research, and his 

 subject matter was equally diverse. He treated paleobotany as an 

 interdisciplinary field of science and in doing so stressed evolu- 

 tionary theory, comparative morphology, organic geochemistry, 

 historical geology, plant geography, and archeology. 



Elso Barghoorn was at the forefront of studies of the origin 

 and antiquity of life on the earth. It was a bold move to recog- 

 nize and point to evidence for the existence of structurally pre- 

 served plants about one and a half billion years old in 

 Precambrian rocks of the Canadian Shield which he did with 

 Stanley Tyler in 1954. Just how bold can be judged by the fact 

 that prior to this and subsequent evidence, most of the Precam- 

 brian was regularly dismissed as being irrelevant as far as life on 

 the earth was concerned. Since the first impact of the idea that 

 life might have originated so far back in the earth's history, 

 research on Precambrian fossils has blossomed into a major 



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