Gerrit Smith Miller Jr. (December 6, 1869 – February 24, 1956), was an

American American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, pe ...

zoologist and

botanist Botany, also called , plant biology or phytology, is the science of plant life and a branch of biology. A botanist, plant scientist or phytologist is a scientist who specialises in this field. The term "botany" comes from the Ancient Greek wo ...

. He was born in

Peterboro, New York Peterboro, located approximately southeast of Syracuse, New York, is a historic hamlet and currently the administrative center for the Town of Smithfield, Madison County, New York, United States. Peterboro has a Post Office, ZIP code 13134 ...

, in 1869. His great-grandfather was

Gerrit Smith Gerrit Smith (March 6, 1797 – December 28, 1874), also spelled Gerritt Smith, was a leading American social reformer, abolitionist, businessman, public intellectual, and philanthropist. Married to Ann Carroll Fitzhugh, Smith was a candidat ...

, the wealthy abolitionist, businessman, and politician; his father the livestock farmer Gerrit Smith Miller. He graduated from Harvard University in 1894 and worked under Clinton Hart Merriam at the United States Department of Agriculture. He became assistant curator of mammals at the United States National Museum in Washington in 1898 and was curator from 1909 to 1940, when he became an associate in biology at the Smithsonian Institution. In 1906 he traveled to France, Spain, and Tangier on a collecting trip. In 1915, he published results of his studies of casts of specimens associated with the

Piltdown Man The Piltdown Man was a paleoanthropological fraud in which bone fragments were presented as the fossilised remains of a previously unknown early human. Although there were doubts about its authenticity virtually from the beginning, the remains ...

, concluding that the jaw actually came from a fossil ape and that the skullcap came from a modern human. He was awarded the 1934 Leidy Award from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.

References

External links

* * *
Finding Aid to Gerrit Smith Miller Jr. Papers, at the Smithsonian Institution Archives
American mammalogists American taxonomists 1869 births 1956 deaths Harvard University alumni People from Peterboro, New York 19th-century American zoologists 20th-century American zoologists Scientists from New York (state) Gerrit Smith {{US-zoologist-stub