Malcolm Rutherford Thorpe papers

MALCOLM RUTHERFORD THORPE (1891-1957)

Thorpe recieved his BA from Yale in 1913 and then took a Ph.D. in geology at Yale in 1916 and held a Yale College Fellowship during 1914-1915. In 1917 he surveyed positions for gun emplacements along the New England coast, under the U.S. Geologic Survey and the National Council of Defense, and the following year taught military geology to S.A.T.C. and R.O.T.C. students at Yale and military camps. He was a member of the University staff from 1919 until 1938, serving in the following capacities: preparator in vertebrate paleontology, 1919; assistant, 1919-1922; assistant curator, 1922-1927 (also fellow, 1922-1923); research associate, 1923-1938; curator 1927-1938; also curator of osteology, 1923-1938 (and taught osteological morphology, 1929-1938); acting director, Peabody Museum, 1927.

He served as a Commencement marshal from 1923 to 1928 and as chief Commencement marshal for the next ten years, was chief marshal for President Seymour's inauguration in 1937. He was chairman of the Emerson Tuttle Portrait Committee in 1945 and later (1946-1948) of the Emerson Tuttle Memorial Committee. He was an associate fellow of Davenport Colleg from 1933 onwards.

Thorpe carried out geological field work in various places, including South Dakota, Nebraska, Wyoming, Utah, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Jersey, eastern and western Canada, and in England, Scotland, and France. He edited Organic Adaptation to Environment, published by the Yale University Press in 1924, and is the author of "The Osteology of Eporcodon Socialis Marsh" and "The Marycoidodantidae, An Extinct Group of Ruminant Mammals," both of which appeared in publications of Peabody Museum. He also contributed the sections on the Abajo Mountains to The San Juan Country, by Herbert E. Gregory. The U.S. Department of the Interior published a paper of his in 1939, and he has had some fifty other scientific articles published, as well as many reviews of scientific publications.

He belonged to the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Academy of National Sciences (Philadelphia), the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, the Society of Mammalogists, the Geologic Society of America, the American Geographic Society, the Geochemical Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as well as to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi. He also belonged to the Graduates Club in New Haven.