Charles Lewis Camp

Charles Lewis Camp (March 12, 1893 – August 14, 1975) was an American palaeontologist and zoologist, working from the University of California, Berkeley. He took part in excavations at the 'Placerias Quarry', in 1930 and the forty Shonisaurus skeleton discoveries of the 1960s, in what is now the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park. Camp served as the third director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology from 1930 to 1949, and coincidentally as chair of the UC Berkeley Paleontology Department between 1939 and 1949. Camp named a number of species of marine reptiles such as Shonisaurus and Plotosaurus, as well as the dinosaur Segisaurus.

Early life Charles Lewis Camp was born on March 12, 1893, in Jamestown, North Dakota. His father was a U.S. district attorney and amateur geologist. He was raised in Sierra Madre, California, where he met zoologist Joseph Grinnell, with whom he would study and travel with as a teenager. His later scientific interests were influenced by visits to John C. Merriam's fossil beds in Rancho La Brea, and in 1908, he was a member of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology's first field expedition.

Education and scientific career Camp attended Pasadena High School, then Throop Polytechnic Institute before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley, to continue studying with Grinnell. In 1935 and 1936, he received a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, which financed field work in Europe, South Africa, and China. From 1939 to 1949, he also served as the chairman of the Department of Paleontology at Berkeley, before relinquishing the role to focus on the study of anomodont reptiles in South Africa and Arizona. He retired from Berkeley in 1960, but continued his paleontological research, studying labryinthodonts in western Australia with John Cosgriff. Camp was one of the early members of the historical preservation fraternity and social club, E Clampus Vitus, and was the Noble Grand Humbug of the Yerba Buena Lodge in 1938. He remarried in 1973, to Joanna Bilbrey.

The theropod Camposaurus was named in Camp's honor in 1998.

He died on August 14, 1975, in San Jose, California, from complications of pancreatic cancer.

Publications California mosasaurs (Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1942). Classification of the lizards (New York, NY, 1923, reprinted in 1971). Doctoral thesis. Earth song: a prologue to history (Berkeley, California, University of California Press, 1952). Bibliography of fossil vertebrates 1944–1948 (Geological Society of America, New York,1953) co-author Morton Green (1917–2003). A Study of the Phytosaurs, with description of new material from Western North America (Berkeley, Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1930). Methods in Paleontology (California, University of California Press, 1937) co-author G. Dallas Hanna (1887–1970).

Henry R. Wagner and Charles L. Camp, The Plains and the Rockies: A Bibliography of Original Narratives of Travel and Adventure, 1800–1865 (Columbus, OH: Long's College Book Co., 1953). James Clyman, Frontiersman, (Portland, OR: Champoeg Press, 1960).