Elso S. Barghoorn
1915 - 1984
Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn was born in New York City on June 30,1915, but grew up in Ohio. After earning his bachelor's degree from Miami University in Ohio, he went to Harvard in 1937. He received his Ph.D. in 1941. He studiend under Irving W. Bailey, a plant anatomist. After graduating he did research at Harvard's Atkins Botanical Garden at Cienfuegos, Cuba. In 1941, he took a position at Amherst College where he came across a drawer full of fossils and fruits that had been collected by Edward Hitchcock in the nineteenth century. Barghoorn realized these fossils from Brandon Lignite of Vermont could provide a record of early Tertiary climate and vegetation in northeastern North America. Paleobotany became Barghoorn's life work.
Barghoorn became a professor at Harvard in 1946. He was the Fisher Professor of Natural History and curator of the university's collections of plant fossils at the Gray Herbarium.
Barghoorn tested Darwin's speculations on pre-Cambrian life in 1952 and found them correct. Working with the geologist, Stanley Tyler, he found abundant and diverse fossils of bacteria in thin slices of chert from the 2000-million-year-old Gunflint Iron Formation of Ontario.
His investigations of plant fossils pushed back the estimates of the origin of life to more than 3.4 billion years ago. His work showed that life originated soon after a suitable environment appeared on the earth.
Elso Barghoorn died January 22, 1985.
Lynn Margulis and Andrew H. Knoll, "Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn Jr., June 30, 1915–January 27, 1984," <i>Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Sciences</i> 87 (1987): 92- 09; and is found at this website: <a href="http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=11522&page=92" target="_blank">website</a>.