American paleontologist
Farish Alston Jenkins (May 19, 1940 – November 11, 2012) was a professor at Harvard University who studied and taught paleontology. His discoveries included a transitional creature with characteristics of both fish and land animals — Tiktaalik roseae —and one of the earliest known frogs, Prosalirus bitis.[1][2][3][4]
Early life
Farish Jenkins was born in Manhattan on May 19, 1940.[5] He was the oldest of three sons of a marketing executive but was raised by his grandmother in Colorado while his father served in World War II.[5][6]
While he was a student at Princeton, studying geology, Jenkins met Eleanor Tracy. He later married her and they had two children — Henry Edgar and Katherine Temperance.[6] He obtained a master's and doctorate from Yale and served as a captain in the United States Marine Corps.
As a graduate student at Yale, Jenkins took a trip to Nairobi where he is said to have taken his first interest in live animal research: "At the time, black rhinos in the bush were as thick as rats in a dump. With my camera set on self-timer, I managed to pose with one before the beast came on with a charge. I barely made it back to my Morris Minor in time, lost a lens cap on the way, but became, as a result of those three weeks, as much intrigued by living vertebrates as by their extinct relatives."[6]
Academic career
He went on to teach at both Columbia and Harvard. In his later life, Jenkins served at Harvard as a professor of biology, the Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Jenkins made numerous expeditions to the Arctic, including a dozen expeditions to the Triassic of Jameson Land in Greenland, and to other sites from East Africa to Wyoming. He is credited as having helped explain the fish-to-tetrapod evolutionary transition as he helped discover the 375 million year old Tiktaalik roseae.[7]
Jenkins was known for his eccentricity as a professor. When lecturing on the subject of gait, he would illustrate this by walking on a peg leg as the character Captain Ahab from Herman Melville's Moby Dick. When on expedition, he would dress in the dashing style of Indiana Jones and carry a high-powered rifle.[citation needed]
He used cineradiography to take internal pictures of animals moving in various ways. These could be quite elaborate and exciting, using treadmills and a wind tunnel. "Tree shrews ricocheted across my bookshelves and desk," he reminisced.[2]
After being diagnosed with cancer, he said "as a paleontologist, I'm familiar with extinction."[citation needed] He died from pneumonia at Brigham and Women's Hospital on November 11, 2012.
