Wieland, G. R. (George Reber), 1865-1953

George Reber Wieland was a paleobotanist and paleontologist whose specialty was fossils of cycads; research associate at Yale University, 1906-1935; leader of scientific expeditions in the West, Mexico, and South America; author of numerous books and articles on fossils and petrified forests.

Wieland was a paleobotanist and paleontologist whose specialty was fossils of cycads; research associate at Yale University, 1906-1935; leader of scientific expeditions in the West, Mexico, and South America; author of numerous books and articles on fossils and petrified forests.

George Reber Wieland was born in Boalsburg, Pennsylvania, on January 24, 1865, the son of Washington Frederick Wieland and Margaret Reber. Having received his B.S. degree from Pennsylvania State college in 1893, he studied at the University of Gottingen, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University, from which he received his Ph.D. in 1900. He married Elda Kristina Anderson of Nykoping, Sweden, in 1891.

Wieland entered Yale intending to study vertebrate paleontology, but during the summer of 1897 while aiding O. C. Marsh in collecting in South Dakota, 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 which is considered to be the world's largest collection of cycadeoids.

Wieland was an internationally recognized paleobotanist noted for his research on the fossils of cycads. He held several academic appointments at Yale: lecturer in paleobotany, 1906-1920; research assistant in paleobotany, 1924-1935; and Sterling Fellow in botany, 1928-1929. He took part in several expeditions in North and South America and in Europe, and he made two important discoveries in the Black Hills of South Dakota: a petrified forest of cycads and a skeleton of Archelon, the largest marine turtle known to science. The skeleton is on permanent display in Yale's Peabody Museum of Natural History.

Wieland took title as a homesteader to a 360-acre tract in the Black Hills. He gave it to the United States in 1922 for the purpose of establishing the Fossil Cycad National Monument, but he became involved in a public quarrel over this project with Harold Ickes, Roosevelt's Secretary of the Interior. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, plans to develop the monument were postponed indefinitely.

As well as being one of the first scientists to be designated a research associate of the Carnegie Institute, Wieland was also the recipient of a gold medal from Archduke Rainer of Austria and a medal for his dedicatory address at the Capellini Museum at Bologna.

Until his retirement in the 1940s, Wieland remained at Yale as a research associate. During his academic stay, he wrote his important two volumes on American Fossil Cycads (1906, 1916). Wieland died in 1953.