Leo George Hertlein was the consummate researcher, highly respected by his peers in the fields of invertebrate paleontology and malacology. He wrote few if any "popular" articles on fossils, however, so was not well known to the general public. His immense contributions have been largely unrecognized outside of professional circles.

Leo Hertlein (pronounced hert-line) was born in 1898 on a farm in Pratt County, Kansas. When he was ten, his family moved to Wichita, but Leo, who was the youngest of four children, continued to spend summers on the farm. After graduating from Wichita High School in 1916, he worked in the city for a year. He then traveled west to visit his sister in Idaho, eventually moving to the Pacific Coast where he enrolled as a geology major at the University of Oregon.

He took his first paleontology course from Katherine Van Winkle Palmer, and additional courses from Earl Packard. Packard was a gifted teacher who taught quite a few other well-known paleontologists.

Hertlein did not immerse himself completely in academics and throughout his life maintained a number of interests outside of science, such as music, literature, theater, and football. He took half a year off from college to work in the merchant marine, and during the summers worked as a commercial fisherman, copper miner, and timber surveyor.

After receiving his B.A. in geology in 1922, he enrolled as a graduate student at Stanford University. There he became a paleontology major under the guidance of Dr. James Perrin Smith, another inspirational professor who taught many other famous molluscan paleontologists.

He received his Ph.D. in 1929. For his doctoral dissertation, he studied the Pliocene fossils of the San Diego area. The San Diego Formation is a unit rich in marine invertebrates and vertebrates, similar to (but slightly younger than) the Purisima Formation here in the Monterey Bay region. Not satisfied with only producing a dissertation, his studies of the San Diego Formation became a decades-long pursuit. Sure, he conducted many other investigations, but he continued to return to studies of the San Diego Pliocene, publishing (along with colleague and fellow Stanford graduate Ulysses S. Grant IV) three major papers on the area's geology and fossils over the next four decades.

In 1926 he was appointed Assistant Curator at the Department of Paleontology, California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco. It marked the beginning of Hertlein's long and productive career with the Academy, where he eventually became Curator of Invertebrate Paleontology and was elected a Fellow.

In the early 1930s, Hertlein began studies on the invertebrates from the Galapagos Islands and nearshore areas of Central America and Mexico. He and A. M. Strong worked up descriptions of new species of mollusks collected during the Templeton Crocker and Zaza expeditions to the tropical eastern Pacific led by the New York Zoological Society. Over the next two decades, they described 230 new molluscan taxa.

Hertlein published over 150 scientific papers, mostly descriptions of Recent and fossil mollusks, echinoderms, and brachiopods from California, Oregon, Washington, and Mexico. He also contributed numerous faunal lists, age determinations, and faunal correlations to reports prepared by other workers. Probably the closest thing to a popular article he wrote was the chapter on invertebrate fossils for the Geologic Guidebook of the San Francisco Bay Counties, issued by the California Division of Mines and Geology in 1951.

Published accounts say little about Hertlein's personal life, other than that he married his wife, Margaret, in 1940 and that they liked vacationing at state and national parks. She taught speech and drama in the Adult Education Division of the San Francisco School System.

I never met Dr. Hertlein, but one of his colleagues once shared the story of a tragedy that befell the paleontologist early in his career. Hertlein was close friends with Eric Knight Jordan, fellow Stanford graduate, paleontologist, and son of Stanford's first president, David Starr Jordan. Hertlein and Jordan went on field trips together and published several papers on fossils from Mexico. Sadly, Jordan was killed in an automobile accident. Hertlein was the driver and always blamed himself for the death of his good friend. Whether this was justified or not is unknown, but Hertlein never drove again. In San Francisco he relied on public transportation. Elsewhere, he had others do the driving.

Several of Hertlein's major works deserve special notice because of their significance to California paleontology. All were collaborative efforts with U. S. Grant IV. (Grant taught at UCLA and was a grandson of the famous general and president.) In 1938 they published "The West American Cenozoic Echinoidea," followed in 1944 by "The Cenozoic Brachiopoda of Western North America" (UCLA Publications in Math and Physical Science, volumes 2 and 3 respectively). Also in 1944 came Part 1 of their series, "The Geology and Paleontology of the Marine Pliocene of San Diego, California." These were published as parts of Volume 2 of the Memoirs of the San Diego Society of Natural History. Part 1 was on geology. Part 2a was on non-molluscan invertebrates and issued in 1960. Part 2b on pelecypods was issued in July, 1972. For each species they provided synonyms, specimen numbers, ranges, occurrences within the formation, the original description, illustrations, and remarks. Many of the species occur in other parts of California too, making these publications useful to a wide audience.

Unfortunately, Hertlein died January 15, 1972, before the pelecypod volume was released, though probably after he had completed work on it. In 1977 U. S. Grant IV died, along with the last hope of ever publishing Part 2c (the gastropods). Hertlein, of course, had been gathering information on the topic for decades and had assembled a vast card file of information. Paleontologist Warren Addicott, in his biographical sketch of Hertlein, had high praise for the example he set for others: "Hertlein's publications stand as models of thorough and painstaking scientific investigation, special qualities that have characterized all aspects of his scientific career. The high quality of his reports, at once obvious to anyone who has had occasion to refer to them, is the result of meticulous searching of all pertinent literature, and, wherever possible, solicitation and careful weighing of the views of associates."

Addicott went on to write, "Among his unsung contributions may also be listed his many contacts with young paleontologists and malacologists who have benefited from his untiring help and enthusiastic encouragement with their research projects."

-- Frank Perry

Further reading:

Addicott, Warren O. 1970. Biographical sketch of Leo G. Hertlein. The Nautilus,v. 84, no. 2, pp. 37-41. This entire volume was dedicated to Hertlein. Other articles include a bibliography of his works, a list of scientific names he proposed, and a list of taxa proposed in his honor.

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