John Harry Mortenson (November 24, 1930 – March 12, 2015) was an American politician who was a Democratic member of the

Nevada General Assembly The Nevada Assembly is the lower house of the Nevada Legislature, the state legislature (United States), state legislature of the U.S. state of Nevada, the upper house being the Nevada Senate. The body consists of 42 members, elected to two-year ...

. A nuclear physicist, Mortenson, he earned a Bachelor of Science degree from the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the University System of M ...

. He went on to study at American University and Catholic University before earning his master's degree at

Duke University Duke University is a private research university in Durham, North Carolina. Founded by Methodists and Quakers in the present-day city of Trinity in 1838, the school moved to Durham in 1892. In 1924, tobacco and electric power industrialist James ...

. He worked at

Los Alamos National Laboratory Los Alamos National Laboratory (often shortened as Los Alamos and LANL) is one of the sixteen research and development laboratories of the United States Department of Energy (DOE), located a short distance northwest of Santa Fe, New Mexico, ...

from 1962 to 1971. Mortenson and his wife, Helen, a longtime consultant specializing in nuclear, radiological and environmental issues, "fought tooth and nail" against the redevelopment of Tule Springs, a large urban Las Vegas retreat, in order "to preserve the 250,000-year-old bone fragments of such prehistoric creatures as Mammoths and giant sloths known to be at the site." They succeeded in getting the site declared the Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument, permanently preserving and protecting the area for research and other scientific studies.Obituary
lasvegassun.com. Accessed August 23, 2022.

References

1930 births 2015 deaths Nevada Democrats {{Nevada-politician-stub