Chester Stock (28 January 1892 – 7 December 1950) was an American paleontologist who specialized in the

Pleistocene The Pleistocene ( , often referred to as the ''Ice age'') is the geological epoch that lasted from about 2,580,000 to 11,700 years ago, spanning the Earth's most recent period of repeated glaciations. Before a change was finally confirmed in ...

mammalian fauna of the

Rancho La Brea Rancho La Brea was a Mexican land grant in present-day Los Angeles County, California, given in 1828 to Antonio Jose Rocha and Nemisio Dominguez by José Antonio Carrillo, the alcalde of Los Angeles. Rancho La Brea consisted of one square le ...

tar pits. He served as a professor of geology at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. Stock was born in

San Francisco San Francisco (; Spanish for " Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the fourth most populous in California and 17th ...

to John Englebert Stock and Maria Henriette Meyer, both German immigrants. He grew up in a poor neighborhood, selling newspapers to earn some money. He was educated at Starr King Primary School and Franklin Grammar School, spending weekends at a gymnasium studying German, and learned to play tuba at a local Lutheran Church. He also took an interest in science, attending the annual mechanics fair and the museum of the

California Academy of Sciences The California Academy of Sciences is a research institute and natural history museum in San Francisco, California, that is among the largest museums of natural history in the world, housing over 46 million specimens. The Academy began in 1853 ...

. His family home was destroyed by fires caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, after which he joined the California National Guard. He was forced by circumstances to leave school and seek employment in the Union Iron Works, at which time his health declined and he came down with malaria. His mother and brother pushed him back into his studies, and he graduated in 1910 from Mission High School. He then attended the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

with the intent to study medicine but, influenced by

John C. Merriam John Campbell Merriam (October 20, 1869 – October 30, 1945) was an American paleontologist, educator, and conservationist. The first vertebrate paleontologist on the West Coast of the United States, he is best known for his taxonomy of ver ...

, instead took an interest in paleontology. He authored a paper of the remains of the

for his graduation in 1914, after which he continued his studies under Merriam. He collected paleontological samples in the Hawker Cave for his 1918 PhD dissertation. He soon joined the university as an instructor and, when Merriam moved to Washington in 1921, began teaching vertebrate paleontology. The newly founded California Institute of Technology was being expanded by R.A. Millikan, who recruited J.P. Buwalda and Chester Stock for the geology department. Stock worked there until his death. The plesiosaur ''

Morenosaurus stocki ''Morenosaurus'' is an extinct genus of plesiosaur from the Cretaceous of what is now California. The type species is ''Morenosaurus stocki'', first named by Samuel Welles in 1943, in honor of Dr. Chester Stock.Hilton, Richard P., ''Dinosaur ...

'', a flamingo ''

Phoenicopterus stocki ''Phoenicopterus stocki'', also known as Stock's flamingo, is an extinct species of flamingo from the Pliocene of Chihuahua, Mexico. It was described in 1944 as a small bodied flamingo species known from assorted fragmentary remains, including b ...

'', and a fossil bat '' Desmodus stocki'' are among the species that have been named after him. In 1921 Chester married Clara Margaret Doud, with whom he had a son and a daughter. After her death in 1934, he married Margaret Gardner Wood in 1935 and they had another son.

References

External links

Rancho La Brea. A Record of Pleistocene Life in California. Los Angeles Museum.
(1930)
Quaternary antelope remains from a second cave deposit in the Organ Mountains, New Mexico. Los Angeles Museum.
(1930) * Merriam, John C. and Stock, Chester (1932
The Felidae of Rancho La Brea
Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication. No.422. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, DC. {{DEFAULTSORT:Stock, Chester 1892 births 1950 deaths American paleontologists University of California, Berkeley alumni California Institute of Technology faculty