Camp, Charles Lewis, 1893-1975

Charles Camp was born in Jamestown, N.D. on Mar. 12, 1893. He attended the University of California, Berkeley and Columbia University and joined the U.C. Berkeley faculty as a zoologist in 1922. He transferred to the Paleontology Department in 1930, and he directed the museum of Paleontology from 1930 until 1949. Camp was also a dedicated historian of the American West. Camp died on Aug. 14, 1975.

Camp was professor emeritus of paleontology at University of University of California, Berkeley, at the time of his death in 1975.

Biography

Charles Lewis Camp was born in 1893 in Jamestown, North Dakota. Camp attended the University of California, Berkeley and received his M.A. degree from Columbia University. He served in World War I before returning to Columbia to teach and earn his Ph.D. He then went back to Berkeley and became a Research Associate at the Museum of Paleontology at U.C. Berkeley, where he remained for the rest of his career. Known for his collecting of fossils in Nevada and elsewhere, he became a professor of Paleontology and head of the Department as well as director of the Museum.

Paleontological writings of his include A Study of the Phytosaurs With Description of New Material from Western North America (1930), A New Type of Small Bipedal Dinosaur From the Navajo Sandstone of Arizona (1936), and Phylogeny and Functions of the Digital Ligaments of the Horse (1942). He was a member of the following organizations: California Academy of Sciences, New York Academy of Sciences, Geological Society of America, Paleontological Society, American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists, The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, Cooper Ornithological Club, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the California Historical Society, and the Pacific Coast Branch of the American Historical Society.

Camp's interest in history led to his association with the California Historical Society beginning in 1922. He contributed to the California Historical Society Quarterly and edited books, such as Kit Carson in California and The Chronicles of George C. Yount . From 1923 to 1935 he was a Director of the Society and a member of its Publications Committee. In this period of time he wrote a check-list of Western History publications and book-reviews for the Quarterly . Camp also edited and expanded Henry R. Wagner's The Plains and the Rockies : a Contribution to the Bibliography of Original Narratives of Travel and Adventure, 1800-1865, first published in 1920.

Camp wrote a book of poetry called Earth Song (1952), which looked at his experiences as both a historian and a paleontologist. He died in 1975.

( Source : Farquhar, Francis P. Charles L. Camp : Biographer of the West . [California? : s.n., 1963.])