Carroll Lane Fenton (February 12, 1900,

Butler County, Iowa Butler County is a county located in the U.S. state of Iowa. As of the 2020 census, the population was 14,334. Its county seat is Allison. The county was organized in 1854 and named for General William O. Butler. History Butler County was fo ...

– November 16, 1969, New Brunswick, New Jersey) was a geologist,

paleontologist Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossi ...

, neoichnologist, and

historian of science The history of science covers the development of science from ancient times to the present. It encompasses all three major branches of science: natural, social, and formal. Science's earliest roots can be traced to Ancient Egypt and Mesopo ...

. Fenton was the author and illustrator of numerous books on geology and paleontology for a general audience. He published extensively in the field of paleontology in both the professional literature and in popular journals. He was an associate editor of the ''

American Midland Naturalist ''The American Midland Naturalist'' is a quarterly peer-reviewed scientific journal covering natural history. It was established in 1909 by Julius Nieuwland and is published by the University of Notre Dame. According to the ''Journal Citation Repo ...

'' from 1923 to 1960, expanding the coverage of the journal into the arena of paleontology. As an undergraduate in geology at the

University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, U of C, or UChi) is a private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois. Its main campus is located in Chicago's Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood. The University of Chic ...

Fenton met and married fellow undergraduate, Mildred Adams. (Many of his later books were written with his wife, as Mildred Adams Fenton). He received his Bachelor of Science in 1921, then his Doctor of Philosophy in 1926. Fenton was a critic of creationism and documented the evidence for

evolution Evolution is change in the heritable characteristics of biological populations over successive generations. These characteristics are the expressions of genes, which are passed on from parent to offspring during reproduction. Variation ...

in a series of

Little Blue Book Little Blue Books are a series of small staple-bound books published from 1919 through 1978 by the Haldeman-Julius Publishing Company of Girard, Kansas. They were extremely popular, and achieved a total of 300-500 million booklets sold over the s ...

s in the early 1920s.

Publications

* ''A History of Evolution'' (Little Blue Book No. 321) (1922) *''Darwin as a Naturalist'' (Little Blue Book No. 567) (1924)
''Darwin and the Theory of Evolution''
(Little Blue Book No. 568) (1924) * ''Haeckel's Monistic Philosophy'' (Little Blue Book No. 599) (1924) * ''The Evidence for Evolution'' (Little Blue Book No. 694) (1924) * ''Embryology and its Evidence for Evolution''. (Little blue book No. 695) (1924) * ''The Fitness of Life'' (Little Blue Book No. 799) (1925) * ''Life Among the Apes and Monkeys'' (Little Blue Book No. 827) (1925) * ''The World of Fossils'' (1933) * ''Holiday Shore'' (written by Edith M. Patch with illustrations by Fenton) (1935) * ''Life Long Ago: The Story of Fossils'' (1937) * ''Our Amazing Earth'' (1938) * ''The Rock Book'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1940; updated 2003, with new material by Thomas H. Rich and Patricia Vickers-Rich) * ''Earth's Adventures: The Story of Geology for Young People'' (1942) * ''Mountains'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1942) * ''Our Living World'' (1943) * ''The Land We Live On'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1944) * ''The Story of the Great Geologists'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1945) * ''Wild Folk at the Pond'' (1948); juv * ''Worlds in the Sky'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1950) * ''Rocks and Their Stories'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1951) * ''Giants of Geology'' (1952) * ''Wild Folk in the Woods'' (1952); juv * ''Riches from the Earth'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1953); juv * ''Our Changing Weather'' (1954) * ''Prehistoric World'' (1954; 1957) * ''Plants That Feed Us'' (with Herminie B. Kitchen) (1956) * ''The Fossil Book'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1958) * ''Wild Folk in the Desert'' (1958); juv * ''Prehistoric Zoo'' (1959); juv * ''Wild Folk at the Seashore'' (1959); juv * ''Reptiles and Their World'' (1961) * ''In Prehistoric Seas'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1962); juv * ''Birds We Live With'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1963); juv * ''The Moon for Young Explorers'' (with Mildred Adams Fenton) (1963) * ''Tales Told by Fossils'' (1966) * ''Animals That Help Us: The Story of Domestic Animals'' (1973)

References

1900 births 1969 deaths 20th-century American botanists 20th-century American geologists American paleontologists American skeptics Charles Darwin biographers Critics of creationism People from Butler County, Iowa University of Chicago alumni {{US-geologist-stub