In 1899 Elias H. Sellards was a graduate student working on a PhD in paleontology at Yale University. In going over some fossil plants collected from the Wellington shales southeast of the town of Elmo in Dickinson County, Kansas, he came across two insect fossils.  Recognizing the significance of this find, he returned to the site during the summers of 1902 and 1903 and eventually accumulated “ . . . some 2,000 specimens, a number which exceeded the combined fruits of nearly a hundred years' collecting from all other American Paleozoic localities . . . ” (Ref. 24). 

He published a short series of papers (1903-1909, Refs. 36-39) in which he described a number of the insects which seemed to be typical of the fauna.  It was his intention to eventually publish a revision, but he was never able to do so (insects were not his primary field).  He deposited a small number of fossils in the Peabody  Museum at Yale, but kept most of the specimens with him until 1928, when he sent his collection to Harvard.

The next chapter in the story of the Kansas Permian insects opened nearly 20 years later, when Robin J. Tillyard came upon the scene.  Tillyard was English.  He moved to Australia and became a famous and influential entomologist, known especially for his work with dragonflies and with fossils and the evolution of insects.  He wrote two classic books: The biology of dragonflies in 1917, and The insects of Australia and New Zealand in 1926.

Fig. 3.  Robin J. Tillyard (1881-1937)  was born 31 January, 1881 in Norwich, England.   He earned a BA from Cambridge in 1903 and Dsc degrees from Univ. Sydney (1917) and Cambridge (1920).  He was Chief of the Biological Dept., Cawthron Institute, Nelson, New Zealand from 1920 to 1928, when he was named first Chief , Div. of Economic Entomology, Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO). Photo courtesy of CSIRO.

Fig. 4.  Carl Owen Dunbar (1891-1979) was born in Hallowell, Kansas, the son of David and Emma (Thomas) Dunbar.  He received a BA from the University of Kansas in 1913 and a PhD in geology from Yale University in 1917.  He was the Director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale from 1942 until his retirement.  Dunbaria was his namesake.  Photo courtesy Peabody Museum.

Fig. 5.  Charles Schuchert (1856-1942) was born in Cincinnati, Ohio on July 3, 1856 to Philip and Agatha (Mueller) Schuchert.  Schuchert went to Yale in 1904. He was Chair of the Geology Department (1909-1921) and administrative head of the Peabody Museum (1904-1923) during the time of the Yale Elmo expedition (1921).  Megatypus schucherti and Permohymen schucherti were among the insects named in his honor.  Photo courtesy Peabody Museum.

Fig. 6.  Frank M. Carpenter (1902-1994) was born and grew up in the Boston area.  His first trip away from New England was to the Elmo site in Kansas.  Carpenter received his PhD from Harvard.  He became the premier American student of fossil insects.  Photo courtesy of the Snow Entomological Museum, Kansas University.

Tillyard’s studies of Australian fossil insects had led him to the conclusion that the classification of insects would only be understood by serious study of fossils from the Permian, an age when much diversification was taking place.  He took a tour in 1920 to look over fossils from other parts of the world.  At Yale University he came across Sellards’ material, and, in the words of Carl Dunbar (Ref. 24), “his delight was unbounded.” 

Tillyard’s enthusiastic response to these fossils led Professor Charles Schuchert, Curator of the geological collections at the Peabody Museum, to request a grant from the National Academy of Sciences to underwrite an expedition to Kansas in the summer of 1921.  The trip, led by Dunbar, was a resounding success, yielding another 2,000 specimens, bringing the total number of Elmo fossil insect specimens to about 4,000.

All of the Yale Elmo Expedition insect fossils were shipped to Tillyard in New Zealand, and he worked on them from 1921 until his death in 1937. Tillyard, a prolific author, wrote a series of some 20 papers on the Elmo fossil insects (one with Dunbar) that were published between 1923 and 1937 (Refs. 23, 24, 49-68).

The most thorough study of the Elmo fossils came when Frank M. Carpenter came upon the scene.  He had been born in 1902, the year when Sellards began working the Elmo site.  Perhaps  this was prophetic.  Carpenter seems to have been destined to work with fossil insects. 

Liz Brosius of the Kansas Geological Survey told how (Ref. 2), as a youngster of 13, Carpenter came across a book containing a picture of a fossil butterfly. Its wings were outstretched and its color pattern was wonderfully preserved.  The name of the butterfly was Prodryas Persephone.  He told his father that night that he wanted to work with fossil insects when he grew up.  Years later, when Carpenter entered Harvard University to begin his studies, he went into the fossil insect collections.  The first box that he took from the drawers of specimens contained that very butterfly fossil.  “Like a fairy-tale omen, the sudden manifestation of P. Persephone must have assured Carpenter that he was on the right path.  Some years later he became curator of the Harvard collection.  ‘I never dreamed [he said], that I would live the rest of my life within 20 feet of that specimen’ ” (Ref. 2).

Carpenter and one of his professors, Percy Raymond, went to Elmo in 1925 to scout the area and to see if another expedition was warranted given the success experienced by Dunbar for Yale.  They found enough speci-mens at the site to set plans in place for the following year.  Carpenter and two graduate students spent 6 months and collected about 2,400 specimens, bringing the total for Elmo to 6,400 fossil insect specimens in the Sellards, Yale, and Harvard collections.

In 1927, Carpenter traveled to Austin, Texas to study Sellards’ type specimens.  The following year, Sellards sent the remainder of his collection to Carpenter at Harvard.  In 1932 Carpenter returned to the Elmo site on a trip to the central and western United States fossil sites, “…where about two thousand specimens were obtained, bringing the total number of insects in the Harvard collection from this locality to some forty-three hundred" (Ref. 9).  This brought the total for the Elmo site in all collections together at that time to 8300 specimens.

In 1939 Carpenter wrote about his 1935 collecting trip to Elmo, where he “ . . . secured several thousand more insects for the Museum of Comparative Zoology.  The Museum collection from this formation now exceeds eight thousand specimens” (Ref 11).  D. A. Wilbur of Kansas State University reported (Ref. 69) that from 1928 through 1976 he had collected about 2,800 specimens which, when he retired, he deposited with Carpenter at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.   This brings the total for Elmo, all collections, to an incredible 14,800+.

Carpenter’s publications on the Elmo Permian insects spanned sixty years, commencing in 1926 and ending in 1987 (Refs. 3-12, 14-17, 19-22).  They were definitive and comprehensive, and went far toward clarifying understanding of the Permian insect fauna. 

Carpenter studied fossil insects from around the world and from many geological eras.  His encyclopedic knowledge of the fossil insects as a whole is evident in his sole authorship of the monumental two volumes of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology devoted to insects (Ref. 19).  But it was with the Elmo Permian insects that he began his career, and they form a vital and important body of his work, one he always hoped to get back to.  As  he stated during a 1992 interview,  “The fact of the matter is, I haven’t even yet had a chance to study all the specimens collected there”  (L. Brosius, 1999, personal communication).