Background
Gardner, Julia was born on January 26, 1882 in Chamberlain, South Dakota, United States. Daughter of Charles Henry and Julia (Brackett) Gardner.
Gardner, Julia was born on January 26, 1882 in Chamberlain, South Dakota, United States. Daughter of Charles Henry and Julia (Brackett) Gardner.
She was raised in South Dakota but completed high school in North Adams, Massachusetts. Gardner was the first woman admitted as a full-fledged student to the Department of Geology at Johns Hopkins University, and she earned her Doctor of Philosophy in paleontology there in 1911.
She earned a Bachelor of Arts in 1905 and a Master"s degree in 1907 from Bryn Mawr College. She continued work as an assistant in paleontology at the university. The Maryland Geological Survey published her studies of the Late Cretaceous Mollusca of Maryland in 1916.
During World War I she served as an auxiliary nurse in France and worked with the American Friends Service Committee in devastated areas of France after the war, returning to the United States in 1920.
She then joined the United States Geological Survey, spending most of her career studying the Tertiary beds in the coastal plain, including areas from Maryland south into Mexico. Her work in Texas in the 1920s included consultation with petroleum company geologists and identification of seventy new species of Texas fossils.
She did extensive research of Gulf Coast fauna, including in Mexico during the 1930s and 1940s. Gardner served as a United States delegate to the 1926 International Geological Congress in Madrid, Spain and to the 1937 Congress in Moscow.
After the war she toured Japan, encouraging Japanese scientists to continue their work.
Gardner authored over 40 reports that were used as standards of reference regarding tertiary strata in North and South America. These include "The Midway Group of Texas" (Texas University Bulletin 3301, 1935). “Mollusca of the Tertiary Formations of Northeastern Mexico” (Geological Society of America, 1947).
And “The molluscan fauna of the Alum Bluff group of Florida” (United States Geological Survey paper 142, 1926-1947).
During World World War II, as a member of the Military Geology Unit, she helped find the Japanese beaches used to launch incendiary balloon bombs were being launched by identifying shells fragments in the sand-filled ballast of the balloons. Gardner was a member of the Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi societies, as well as the Geological Society of America, the American Association of Petroleum Geologists, and the Paleontological Society.