Baker, Frank Collins
Born: 1867 AD
Died: 1942 AD, at 75 years of age.
1867 - Born in Warren, Rhode Island, he grew up playing with seashells brought to him by his seafaring grandfather. Frank Collins Baker was a leading authority on freshwater and terrestrial gastropods of the Quaternary Period, both living and fossil (Pleistocene).
1889 - He attended a small business college and spent a year at Brown University before getting his big break, a Jessup Scholarship to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.
1894 - Baker was offered a curatorship at the Chicago Academy of Science.
1896 - Baker came from a middle class background, and had just the B.S. degree he earned at the Chicago School of Science.
1898 - He produced his two-volume "Mollusca of the Chicago Area".
1911 - Produced his monograph on the Lymnaeidae.
1918 - He accepted a curatorship at the University of Illinois Museum of Natural History (Urbana).
1920 - He crowned his productive career with his "Life of the Pleistocene or Glacial Period", the two-volume "Mollusca of Wisconsin", his "Fieldbook of Illinois Land Snails", and his monograph on the Planorbidae, published posthumously.
1942 - He died on May 7th in Urbana, Illinois.
Page last updated: 2:46pm, 26th Jul '07