Farish Jenkins

Early life Farish Jenkins was born in Manhattan on May 19, 1940. He was the oldest of three sons of a marketing executive but was raised by his grandmother in Colorado while his father served in World War II.

He obtained his masters and doctorate from Yale and was the school's first graduate student to enroll in courses at the medical school, studying anatomy and embryology. His trips were subsidized by an anonymous benefactor named Rose

Jenkins was known for his eccentricity as a professor. When lecturing on the subject of gait, he would illustrate this by walking on a peg leg as the character Captain Ahab from Herman Melville's Moby Dick. He was known for taking front row students' shoes in order to examine their wear patterns. On expeditions he dressed in the dashing style of Indiana Jones, donning a Czechoslovak rabbit fur hat and carrying a gun and a flask of vodka. He was known to set up systems of wires and automatic rifles to deter polar bears.

He used cineradiography to take internal pictures of animals moving in various ways. These could be quite elaborate and exciting, using treadmills and a wind tunnel. "Tree shrews ricocheted across my bookshelves and desk," he reminisced.

He helped to remove Lawrence Summers from the office of Harvard president.

Personal life At Princeton, Jenkins drove a fellow student, Eleanor Tracy, to a train station more than an hour away. They dated during college and through his military service, and starting in the mid 1970s they lived on an apple orchard in New Hampshire. They had a son and a daughter.

Jenkins was known for his foul language. He made homemade cider from apples he grew and trapped chipmunks that disrupted his barn. After being diagnosed with cancer, he said "as a paleontologist, I'm familiar with extinction." He died from pneumonia at Brigham and Women's Hospital on November 11, 2012.