IGCP 591 - The Early to Middle Paleozoic Revolution: Special Volume in Honor of August F. Foerste

摘要

The educator and paleontologist August Frederick Foerste (text-fig. 1) taught at Steele High School in Dayton, Ohio, for 38 years, but as an undergraduate at Denison University began describing the geology and paleontology of the region (most of his work published through Denison University is now available through their university library website). When he retired from Steele, he was offered a professorship at the University of Chicago, which he turned down, to spend the remaining years of his life as a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institute. The area around Dayton is critical to understand how the Ordovician and Silurian stratigraphy of the Appalachian Basin connects with that of the Illinois Basin, and Foerste's published works over more than three decades serve as the foundation for the stratigraphy of the tri-state region of Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, and the U.S. midcontinent as a whole. Recent works on the Ordovician and Silurian stratigraphy of the region have begun to demostrate that Foerste's work was truly incomparable, much like we saw with O.T. Jones' work in light of the recent efforts of the British Geological Survey during the summer of 2011 in Ludlow, England (at the IGCP 591 1~(st) Annual Meeting).