Joseph Augustine Cushman

Background

Cushman was born on January 31, 1881, in Bridgewater, Massachusetts, the son of Darius Cushman and Jane Frances Fuller Pratt. He grew up in the small college town of Bridgewater, where his father sold and repaired shoes.

Education

Cushman graduated from Bridgewater High School in 1897 and hoped to pursue a medical career, but his father's death forced a change in plans. He entered the Bridgewater Normal School and graduated in 1901. He received a scholarship from Harvard University and entered the Lawrence Scientific School with junior standing in the fall of 1901.

He intended to pursue a career in cryptogamic botany, but fell under the influence of the great specialist in fossil echinoderms, Robert Tracy Jackson. He received a Bachelor of Science in 1903. He was later awarded his Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard in 1909.

Career

In 1903 Cushman became a curator at the Museum of the Boston Society of Natural History and spent some summers on botanical collecting trips. He spent the summers of 1904 and 1905 at the U.S. Fish Commission station at Woods Hole, where Mary J. Rathbun urged him to study rich collections of Foraminifera recently obtained by the commission’s steamer Albatross. Thus began his systematic identification and description of Holocene Foraminifera. When he started his studies, Foraminifera were regarded as primitive, highly variable organism having geologic ranges from Cambrian to Holocene and having no value other than as curiosities.

Cushman began his work within the framework of Brady’s classification of ten families, which was based on morphology of adult forms. Within a short time he began to formulate a radically different classification that resulted from application of Haeckel’s law of recapitulation, in which development of the individual repeats phylogenetic development of the species. Cushman’s classification, consisting of forty - five families, was first published in outline form in 1927 and was republished the next year in a textbook, Foraminifera, Their Classification and Economic Use, which went through four editions.

Cushman was employed in 1912 by the U. S. Geological Survey as a specialist on Foraminifera and in 1914 made his first diffident attempt at age determination of well samples by Foraminifera. By 1918 he was confident enough about Foraminifera to use species as indicators of formations and to include interpretations of their paleoecology. In 1921 he stated that Foraminifera “faunas of the various members of these formations are easily recognizable.” By that time some economic paleontologists had independently realized the truth of this statement and were using Forminifera as stratigraphic tools.

In January 1923, Cushman was employed in Mexico by the Marland Oil Company to apply his knowledge of Foraminifera in correlating surface rock outcrops and drill holes. He returned in March to Sharon, Massachusetts, where he build a private laboratory for consulting work. He continued consulting for another year, then retired from commercial work to devote all his time to research. In 1925 Cushman stated his privately financed journal, Contributions From the Cushman Laboratory for Foraminiferal Research, to contain the numerous papers that came from his prolific pen. He offered his services as teacher without stipend for students from Harvard and Radcliffe and also accepted private students. In 1927 and 1932 he visited Europe to examine type specimens and to collect from type localities.

In the 1920’s Cushman’s interest expanded from formal description of Foraminifera in the Albatross collections to include systematic descriptions of faunas from geologic formations and, in the 1930’s, monographic studies of families and genera. In the 1940’s Cushman began to realize the potential of planktonic species as a means of stratigraphic zonation, and worldwide zonation by planktonic Forminifera found wide acceptance shortly after Cushman’s death. As his work on Holocene faunas increasingly provided a basis for comparison, paleoecologic interpretation became part of Cushman’s work on fossil faunas. During nearly fifty years he produced more than 550 papers. His extensive collections were bequeathed to the U. S. National Museum, where they constitute the world’s largest collection of Foraminifera.

During Cushman’s lifetime the study of Foraminifera progressed from being an obscure hobby of some few dozen investigators, mostly European, to become a major factor in the oil industry, involving thousands of investigators and large sums of money. His classification, now largely superseded by more detailed ones, nevertheless constituted the basic structure for these later ones. Although additional microfossils and other methods are now used in oil exploration, Foraminifera are still an invaluable tool in biostratigraphy and paleoecology.

Achievements

• Cushman pioneered the use of Foraminifera (an order of microscopic shelled Protozoa)in the search for petroleum. His work stimulated other investigators and initiated a period of unprecedented study of the order.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Bulletin the Foraminifera of the Atlantic Ocean: Miliolidae, Ophthalmidiidae and Fischerinidae

    (Volume 6)

  • Carnegie Institution of Washington. Shallow-Water Foraminifera of the Tortugas Region
  • A Monograph of the Foraminifera of the North Pacific Ocean
  • The Pleistocene Deposits of Sankoty Head, Nantucket, and Their Fossils
  • United States National Museum Bulletin 104: The Foraminifera of the Atlantic Ocean

Membership

• Royal Microscopical Society of London , United Kingdom

  1938

• Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists , United States

  1930 - 1931

• Paleontological Society , United States

  1937

• Vice-president

  Geological Society of America , United States

  1938

Connections

In October 1903, Cushman married Alice Edna Wilson of Fall River, Massachusetts. They had three children: Robert Wilson, Alice Eleanor, and Ruth Allerton. She died of tuberculosis in 1912 and in September 1913, Cushman married Frieda Gerlach Billings.

Father:

Darius Cushman

Mother:

Jane Frances Fuller Pratt Cushman

Spouse:

Frieda Gerlach Billings

ex-spouse:

Alice Edna Wilson

Son:

Robert Wilson Cushman

Daughter:

Alice Eleanor Cushman

Daughter:

Ruth Allerton Cushman

colleague:

M. Ruth Todd

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography Volume 3
  1971
• Proceedings Volume of the Geological Society of America
  1952