Elso Sterrenberg Barghoorn was born in New York City on June 30,1915, though he grew up in Dayton, Ohio. He was a superb athlete and quite early on had developed a strong interest in exploration and science. Barghoorn earned an honors degree during his college years, along with spending time as a deckhand aboard a freighter on the Great Lakes. He graduated from Miami University in Ohio and entered Harvard in 1937. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1941, under the guidance of the great plant anatomist, Irving W. Bailey. Under Bailey's guidance, Barghoorn wrote his thesis on the development and evolution of ray structure in dicotyledonous plants, which is a classic that is still read and cited to this day.
After graduating from Harvard, he spent many months doing research at Harvard's Atkins Botanical Garden at Cienfuegos, Cuba. While there, he not only fell in love with the diversity of tropical plants, but the warm trade winds also brought the realization to Barghoorn that he would forever after prefer the warmth of the lower latitudes. In 1941, he took a position at Amherst College , with a starting annual salary of $2000. During his five years there, he came across a drawer full of fossils and fruits that had been collected by Edward Hitchcock in the nineteenth century. Barghoorn realized the importance of those fossils from Brandon Lignite of Vermont. Those fossils could provide a unique record of early Tertiary climate and vegetation in northeastern North America. Barghoorn and a succession of graduate students would combine laboratory investigation and field work over the next forty years to better understand what those fossils of fruits, pollen, seeds, flowers, and wood, could tell them about the Tertiary plant evolution.
During WWII, Barghoorn was called upon to help the military, who had learned of his interest in cellulytic fungi. He was assigned to the Quartermaster's Corps with the unusual task of conducting research on the cloth-rotting fungi plaguing soldiers in the Pacific. Some important scientific strides were made during his research on Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal Zone. After his service to the military, he joined the Harvard faculty in 1946, where he taught paleobotany. He was Fisher Professor of Natural History at Harvard University and Curator of the University's plant fossils collections. (New York Times, CT120 Nov. 91)
Barghoorn was one of his generation's preeminent paleontologists. His work on the early evolution of flowering plants, vegetational changes during the Pleistocene ice age, and the origins of coal added much to his field. He had discovered that he could get glimpses of the world that existed long ago through fossils, which was an entirely new dimension of exploration to him. His greatest scientific achievement was his pioneering study of early life. The scientific community, in 1950, were in agreement that there was probably no way that Darwin's speculations on pre-Cambrian life could be tested. In 1952, Barghoorn and geologist, Stanley Tyler, showed that Darwin was right. They found abundant and diverse fossils of bacteria in thin slices of chert from the c.a. 2000 million year old Gunflint Iron Formation of Ontario.
Barghoorn investigated plant fossils and was able to gradually push back the estimates of the origin of life to more than 3.4 billion years ago. He looked at fossil evidence from the Archean eon, starting with noncontroversial fossils from around 2 billion years ago and then using them in the interpretation of possible fossils dating from as far back as 3.4 billion years ago. In the 1950's, Dr. Barghoorn discovered fossilized colonies of blue-green algae and aquatic fungi near Lake Superior. Those algae were 2 billion years old.
By the 1960's, he increased science's estimate of the age of the earliest known fossils by another billion years. In 1977 he and his colleagues reported finding South African fossils that were estimated to be 3.4 billion years old. This meant that life originated soon after a suitable environment appeared. (New York Times). Francis Bacon may have been "the man who saw through time" according to Loren Eiseley, but that description also applies to Elso Barghoorn and his ground breaking discoveries about early life.
Though Barghoorn taught for nearly forty years at Harvard, he seemed to always be yearning to be somewhere else. Barghoorn loved and much preferred to be in the Australian outback, the African veldt, or the Panamanian jungle, rather than in a classroom in a suit and tie ( noose, he called it). He was happiest and most alive when surrounded by flowers, trees, fossils, and their evolutionary history. Elso Barghoorn was first, and foremost, an explorer, discover, and a scientist.
In 1941, Barghoorn married his first wife, Margaret Alden MacLeod. They had a son, Steven, who followed his father into the field of paleontology, specializing in invertebrate paleontology. Elso and Margaret later divorced. He then married Teresa Joan LaCroix in 1953, but it ended in divorce also. He married his last wife, Dorothy Dellmer Osgood, in 1964. Dorothy graduated from Mt. Holyoke College with degrees in geology and geography. She was a knowledgeable companion to Elso in the laboratory and office for almost twenty years. She died in 1982. Elso Barghoorn died January 22, 1985.
New York Times, CT120 91.Volume 22, Pg. 1273, November
Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 135, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 87-90
Former link, www.google.com/search?9barghoorn%2c+elso+&btng+google+search, (2001)
Written By: Amber Degner, 2001
Edited By: Lillian Dolentz, 2008