George Reber Wieland (b. 1865, d. 1953) was born in Pennsylvania
and received his undergraduate education at the Pennsylvania State
College. He continued his studies at the University of Göttingen and
the University of Pennsylvania. In 1898 he moved to New Haven,
Connecticut, to attend Yale University, where 2 years later he received
his Ph.D.
Wieland came to Yale intending to study vertebrate paleontology, but while collecting fossils for O.C. Marsh
in South Dakota during the summer of 1898 he met the paleobotanist
Lester Ward. Ward had made a collection of cycadeoid trunks in the
Black Hills of South Dakota in 1893, and it was through Ward’s
encouragement and Marsh’s collecting that Wieland’s scientific interest
in these fossil trunks flourished. It is principally through Wieland’s
efforts that Yale accumulated a collection of 1,000 specimens,
considered to be the world’s largest collection of cycadeoids.
Wieland remained at Yale as a research associate until his retirement
in the 1940s. During his academic stay, he wrote his important 2
volumes on American Fossil Cycads (1906, 1916). Wieland died in 1953.