Glenn Lowell Jepsen (b. 1903, d. 1974), the first to hold the
appointment of Sinclair Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at
Princeton University, served the university, and the Princeton
Geological Museum in particular, for some 49 years.
He
was born in Lead, South Dakota, but his family moved to Rapid City
while he was still a young child. After graduating from high school, he
attended the University of Michigan for only a year, returning to South
Dakota to teach English at the School of Mines and attending classes at
the school part time. A chance encounter with William Sinclair
on one of his many expeditions to the West in the 1920s led to Jepsen
being persuaded to apply to Princeton. With this meeting, the 2 men
began a friendship and working relationship that would last until
Sinclair’s untimely death in 1935.
In 1927, Jepsen
completed his undergraduate degree in geology and set out on his first
collecting expedition to Wyoming. His commitment to fieldwork continued
throughout his career, for as he put it, “Expeditions to collect
long-dead bones and other fossils have been significant assets to our
museum not only in obtaining valuable specimens but also in the more
important sphere of influencing men’s lives.”
He continued at Princeton, receiving his Ph.D. in 1930 under Sinclair
and W.B. Scott, and was appointed as an instructor in the Department of
Geology the next year. His subsequent appointments included Curator of
Vertebrate Paleontology in 1936, Assistant Professor in 1934, Associate
Professor in 1940 and, as mentioned above, the Sinclair Professorship
of Vertebrate Paleontology in 1946. In 1962, Yale University awarded
him the Addison Emery Verrill Medal, one of that University’s highest
honors. He served as Director of Princeton’s natural history museum
from 1936 until his retirement in 1971. On his retirement, the Glenn L.
Jepsen Fund in Natural History was established to support student
research, particularly in vertebrate paleontology.
Jepsen was unwavering in his belief that the purpose of the
university’s natural history museum was to provide Princeton’s students
with an inestimable educational resource, to stimulate their
“…interests in research, conservation, aesthetic enjoyment, and to
heighten the human sense of life.” It is almost prophetic that in 1964
he wrote, “It is regrettable (and now regretted) in some museums that
during bursts of short-sighted and provincial economy and cleanup
activities the baby was thrown out with the bath water…. Princeton, of
all places, must continue to preserve significant parts of the past, as
it has done for more than a century in museums of both art and natural
science, in order to fortify future education.”
Jepsen’s patient and persistent collecting of the Paleocene fauna of
Polecat Bench in Wyoming resulted in Princeton’s possessing one of the
best collections of this type in North America. Instead of amassing
large collections spanning vast amounts of geological time and great
geographical distances, Jepsen endeavored to understand as completely
as possible the animals and environment that existed during one of the
most crucial epochs in mammalian evolution, the Paleocene. The
publications that resulted from this endeavor not only included
descriptions of new genera and species, but also faunal analyses and,
following in Sinclair’s footsteps, biostratigraphic correlations of the
nonmarine North American Tertiary.