Walker et al.—In Memoriam: Arthur James Boucot
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in 1947, he soon found that mineral chemistry was not his forte, and he turned to paleontology and stratigraphy under the inspired mentorship of the innovative geobiologist Preston Cloud, Jr., then an assistant professor at Harvard University. Art graduated magna cum laude in Geology (A.B., 1948) and obtained his master’s degree a year later. Art received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1953 for his
Figure 2. Navigator Art Boucot, standing third from left, Topeka Kansas Air Base, 1944, prior to going overseas during WWII.
work on the Silurian–Devonian stratigraphy of the Moose River Group, west-central Maine, mentored first by Cloud and then by Marland Billings, after Cloud moved to the U.S.G.S. Cloud offered Art a job at the U.S.G.S. working in mapping and stra- tigraphy (1951–1956). During that time, Art learned Paleozoic gastropods and brachiopods from the world-renown J. Brookes Knight and G. Arthur Cooper, respectively, at the Smithsonian Institution. Art went through the ranks to associate professor at MIT (1957–1961), moved to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 1961, and received his professorship there in 1966. He then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in 1968, but after a disgruntled year, became a professor of geology, and then zoology, at Oregon State University (OSU; 1969–2006) in Corvallis, Oregon. At OSU, Art was a distinguished professor of zoology (1991–2006) and emeritus professor from 2006 to his death. His scientific passions concerned the biostratigraphy of
Figure 3. Art enjoying the snow at Horsham St. Faith Air Field, England, 1944, WWII.
six miles from their English airbase, the remaining three engines went out. Incredibly, the pilot dove through the clouds to maintain speed and landed the B-24 in the grass just short of the runway (a B-24 was not supposed to glide!). Awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross, among other
service medals, Art returned from the War, and, facilitated by Dr. Gordon and Veteran’s National Scholarships, he started his undergraduate mineralogical studies at Harvard College. Although he published his first paper on the mineral triplite
Silurian and Devonian rocks and the evolutionary ecology and biogeography of paleocommunities. He worked primarily with Paleozoic brachiopods discovering that rare species were important for recognizing stratigraphic boundaries, while cos- mopolitan taxa were more resistant to extinction.He was known to ‘boucotize’ outcrops so that he could find the rare species that helped him refine geologic maps and stratigraphic relationships. Clearly, Art dissolved or cut open megatons of limestone in pursuit of brachiopods and other paleoinvertebrates! One Boucot rumor suggests that he took a backhoe to dig up fossils on a golf course in Wales: that did not go over well. He also studied how taxa with small populations evolved more quickly than taxa with larger populations. These findings led to the development of his evolutionary-ecology units (EEUs, with homage to d’Orbigny and Oppel), laying the foundation for Phanerozoic community stasis during environmental stability and community turnover during environmental change. He also saw that behavior, once formed, was relatively fixed in ecological systems and over time. He was especially keen on the study of coevolution, from parasites to symbiosis. With Jane Gray, he published the earliest record of land plants at that time (1971), and they continued their research on early land-plant evolution and the importance of fossils as paleoclimatic indi- cators until her death in 2000 (Figure 4). His early studies (1951–1953) presaged the taphonomic revolution in the 1980s, revealing how current sorting affected shell distributions, how life and death assemblages were different, and how fossils were preserved in metamorphic rocks. In all, Art published nearly 570 papers, including eight books, a prodigious number of geologic maps and monographs, book chapters, and edited volumes. True to his dictum that evolution does not take place
in an ecological vacuum, Art was a great collaborator. He worked with graptolite specialist William “Bill” Berry on Silurian stratigraphy of North America, conodont specialist Michael Murphy on Great Basin stratigraphy, and
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