Grinnell College is a private liberal arts college in Grinnell, Iowa, United States. It was founded in 1846 when a group of New England Congregationalists established Iowa College. It has an open curriculum, which means students may choose most of the classes they take, instead of taking a prescribed list of classes.
The Marchantiophyta are a division of non-vascular land plants commonly referred to as hepatics or liverworts. Like mosses and hornworts, they have a gametophyte-dominant life cycle, in which cells of the plant carry only a single set of genetic information.
Hornworts are a group of non-vascular Embryophytes constituting the division Anthocerotophyta. The common name refers to the elongated horn-like structure, which is the sporophyte. As in mosses and liverworts, hornworts have a gametophyte-dominant life cycle, in which cells of the plant carry only a single set of genetic information; the flattened, green plant body of a hornwort is the gametophyte stage of the plant.
John Campbell Merriam was an American paleontologist, educator, and conservationist. The first vertebrate paleontologist on the West Coast of the United States, he is best known for his taxonomy of vertebrate fossils at the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles, particularly with the genus Smilodon, more commonly known as the sabertooth cat. He is also known for his work to extend the reach of the National Park Service.
Takakia is a genus of two species of mosses known from western North America and central and eastern Asia. The genus is placed as a separate family, order and class among the mosses. It has had a history of uncertain placement, but the discovery of sporophytes clearly of the moss-type firmly supports placement with the mosses.
Buxbaumia is a genus of twelve species of moss (Bryophyta). It was first named in 1742 by Albrecht von Haller and later brought into modern botanical nomenclature in 1801 by Johann Hedwig to commemorate Johann Christian Buxbaum, a German physician and botanist who discovered the moss in 1712 at the mouth of the Volga River. The moss is microscopic for most of its existence, and plants are noticeable only after they begin to produce their reproductive structures. The asymmetrical spore capsule has a distinctive shape and structure, some features of which appear to be transitional from those in primitive mosses to most modern mosses.
Sir John Harrison Burnett was a British botanist and mycologist, who served as the principal and vice chancellor of Edinburgh University from 1979 to 1987.
Albert Spear Hitchcock was an American botanist and agrostologist.
The Henry S. Conard Environmental Research Area (CERA) is a protected environmental research facility at 41°41′00″N92°51′52″W outside Kellogg, Iowa. The 365-acre facility is owned and operated by Grinnell College for class use in the study of ecology and student and faculty research. The preserve is named for Henry S. Conard, a bryologist and ecologist who long served as the chair of the college's Department of Botany. It is located eleven miles from the Grinnell College campus.
George Frederick Magoun, a member of the Iowa Band of Congregationalist ministers, was the first president of Iowa College, where he served as college president from 1865 to 1885.
William Campbell Steere (1907–1989) was an American botanist known as an expert on bryophytes, especially arctic and tropical American species. The standard author abbreviation Steere is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Howard Alvin Crum was an American botanist dedicated to the study of mosses, and was a renowned expert on the North American bryoflora.
Hugo Leander Blomquist was a Swedish-born American botanist. His well rounded expertise encompassed fungi, bacteria, bryophytes, algae, grasses, and ferns. The standard author abbreviation H.L.Blomq. is used to indicate this person as the author when citing a botanical name.
Shiv Ram Kashyap was a botanist in British India. He was a specialist on the bryophytes especially from the Himalayan region. He has been called the father of Indian bryology.
Geneva Sayre was an American bryologist and bibliographer. She "pioneered bibliographical and historical bryology, a new field in the study, evaluation, and organization of the literature of bryology."
Albert LeRoy Andrews (1878–1961) was a professor of Germanic philology and an avocational bryologist, known as "one of the world’s foremost bryologists and the American authority on Sphagnaceae." From 1922 to 1923 he was the president of the Sullivant Moss Society, renamed in 1970 the American Bryological and Lichenological Society.
Paul Leslie Redfearn Jr. (1926–2018) was an American professor of botany, specializing in mosses and liverworts. He was the president of the American Bryological and Lichenological Society from 1971 to 1973. He was the mayor of Springfield, Missouri from 1978 to 1981.
Cornelia Clarke was a nature photographer from Grinnell, Iowa. Over 1,200 of her photographs were published in magazines, encyclopedias, books and newspapers. Her earliest published photos were of her pet cats, Peter and Polly, dressed and posed imitating human activities. These popular photos were turned into a children's book. As her skills advanced, her reputation for capturing objects in nature spread, with her specialty being insect and plant life. She also took a variety of natural landscape photographs, especially of the area around her home in Grinnell, Iowa. Many of the original photographs and glass plate negatives are in the collections of the Drake Community Library, Grinnell Historical Museum, and the State Historical Society of Iowa.
Elizabeth Laetitia Moon Conard was an American college instructor, politician, community leader and activist, based in Iowa. She taught sociology and economics at Grinnell College, and ran for governor of Iowa in 1932.
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