Roland Wilbur Brown (1893–1961) was an American

paleobotanist Paleobotany, which is also spelled as palaeobotany, is the branch of botany dealing with the recovery and identification of plant remains from geological contexts, and their use for the biological reconstruction of past environments (paleogeogr ...

and

geologist A geologist is a scientist who studies the solid, liquid, and gaseous matter that constitutes Earth and other terrestrial planets, as well as the processes that shape them. Geologists usually study geology, earth science, or geophysics, althou ...

Biography

Brown was born in 1893. In 1928, he was appointed as a geologist with the

United States Geological Survey The United States Geological Survey (USGS), formerly simply known as the Geological Survey, is a scientific agency of the United States government. The scientists of the USGS study the landscape of the United States, its natural resources, ...

, where he remained until he retired in 1958. He also served as a

Research Associate Research associates are researchers (scholars and professionals) that usually have an advanced degree beyond a Master's degree. In some universities/research institutes, such as Harvard/Harvard Medical School/Harvard School of Public Health, the ...

in the Department of Geology of the

United States National Museum The Smithsonian Institution ( ), or simply the Smithsonian, is a group of museums and education and research centers, the largest such complex in the world, created by the U.S. government "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge". Founded ...

, starting from 1951 util his death in 1961. He studied

Cenozoic The Cenozoic ( ; ) is Earth's current geological era, representing the last 66million years of Earth's history. It is characterised by the dominance of mammals, birds and flowering plants, a cooling and drying climate, and the current configura ...

and

Mesozoic The Mesozoic Era ( ), also called the Age of Reptiles, the Age of Conifers, and colloquially as the Age of the Dinosaurs is the second-to-last era of Earth's geological history, lasting from about , comprising the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceo ...

plant Plants are predominantly photosynthetic eukaryotes of the kingdom Plantae. Historically, the plant kingdom encompassed all living things that were not animals, and included algae and fungi; however, all current definitions of Plantae exclud ...

s from western North America. Roland Brown also was a linguistic scholar, and is widely known among taxonomists for his book, "Composition of Scientific Words",Brown, R. W. (1954) Composition of Scientific Words. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. originally published in 1927 under the title "Materials for Word-Study" and reprinted in 1954, 1965, 1978, and 1985 under the latter title. It provided a large number of taxonomists in the Twentieth Century with the ability to coin new names of taxa (species, genera, families, etc.), facilitating the conservation of the world's biodiversity.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Brown, Roland W. Paleobotanists 1893 births 1961 deaths