Background
Coolidge was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father Harold Jefferson Coolidge, Senior (1870–1934) was the brother of Archibald Cary Coolidge.
Coolidge was born in Boston, Massachusetts. His father Harold Jefferson Coolidge, Senior (1870–1934) was the brother of Archibald Cary Coolidge.
Coolidge studied at Milton Academy and at the University of Arizona before entering Harvard. Originally, he had wanted to become a diplomat, like his uncle Archibald Cary Coolidge, but he soon turned to biology, specializing in primatology.
After getting a Bachelor of Surgery from Harvard in 1927, he worked as curator at Harvard"s Museum of Comparative Zoology. Coolidge participated in the Harvard Medical Expedition to Africa in 1926/27 to Liberia, from where he brought back a large gorilla that is still on display at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. In 1929 he published "A revision of the genus Gorilla", which forms the basis of the modern taxonomy of the genus Gorilla.
Coolidge participated in the Kelley-Roosevelt Expedition to Asia in 1928/29, and in 1937, he organized and led the Asiatic Primate Expedition through northwest Tonkin and northern Laos to study gibbons.
Coolidge also studied at the University of Cambridge, England. In 1933, he published the first detailed account of bonobos, elevating them to species rank (Pan paniscus).
Ernst Schwarz had already published in 1929 a brief paper on them and had classified them as the subspecies Pan satyrus paniscus, based on a skull from the Belgian Congo discovered at a museum at Tervuren, Belgium. In 1982, twenty years after Schwarz"s death, Coolidge claimed to have discovered that skull first and to have been "taxonomically scooped" by Schwarz.
During World World War II, Coolidge served in the Office of Strategic Services, where he developed, amongst other things, a chemical shark repellent.
He was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1945. After the war, he became director of the Pacific Science Board of the United States. National Academy of Sciences, a post he held until 1970. From 1966 to 1972, he served as International Union for Conservation of Nature president
In 1961, he was also one of the founding directors of the World Wildlife Fund (World Wildlife Fund), and a World Wildlife Fund International Board member from 1971 to 1978.
He died at the hospital in Beverly, Massachusetts of complications after a fall and was buried at Thomas Jefferson"s home, Monticello.
He was also a member of the United States. delegation at the conference in Fontainebleau in France where the International Union for the Conservation of Nature was founded, and was elected its first vice-president