Arthur James Boucot

Education and academic career

Boucot obtained his geology degrees from Harvard University with a B.S. in 1948, an MS in 1949, and a PhD in 1953. Although he began his geological studies focused on mineralogy and petrography, his interest in paleontology was sparked at Harvard by assistant professor Preston Cloud, and expert on the Cambrian Explosion. Boucot's dissertation was on the biostratigraphy of the Devonian Moose River Basin where it crops out in Maine. From 1951 until 1956 he worked at the United States Geological Survey where Cloud was Chief of Paleontology and Stratigraphy. At the USGS he did work with J. Brookes Knight, an expert in Paleozoic gastropods and G. Arthur Cooper, a leading expert in extant and fossil brachiopods. Boucot left the USGS when he was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for studies in Europe collecting Silurian and Devonian fossils in Western Europe. In 1957 he began his academic professional career at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. From 1961 to 1968 he taught at Caltech, then spent a year jointly at the University of Pennsylvania and the Smithsonian Institution, which houses many of his early letters and papers. In 1969 he began his lengthy career as a professor of geology and, eventually, integrative biology, at Oregon State University.

Specializations

Boucot's major publications focus on both North American and global taxonomic studies of Silurian-Devonian invertebrates, primarily brachiopods. In North America Boucot worked largely in New England to publish on the taxonomy of middle Paleozoic brachiopods and create a biogratigraphy of Eastern North American brachiopods. His global field work, including work in Western Europe, Antarctica, and eastern Canada developed large scale taxonomies of Silurian-Devonian brachiopods. His later work, based on collaborative international field work, included publications on paleoecology of middle Paleozoic brachiopods.

Books

• Arthur J. Boucot (1975), Evolution and extinction rate controls, Elsevier, ISBN 978-0-444-41182-2
• Jane Gray; Arthur James Boucot, eds. (1979), Historical biogeography, plate tectonics, and the changing environment: proceedings of the thirty-seventh Annual Biology Colloquium, and selected papers, Oregon State University Press, ISBN 978-0-870-71176-3
• Arthur James Boucot (1981), Principles of Benthic Marine Paleoecology, Academic Press, ISBN 978-0-121-18980-8
• Arthur J. Boucot & George O. Poinar Jr. (2010), Fossil Behavior Compendium, CRC Press, ISBN 978-1-439-81058-3
• Arthur J. Boucot (2013), Evolutionary Paleobiology of Behavior and Coevolution, Elsevier Science, ISBN 978-1-483-29081-2