Estella Leopold

Estella B. Leopold (born 1927) is a paleobotanist and a conservationist. As a researcher in the United States Geological Survey, she aided in uncovering records of plant life from the Miocene around the Eniwetok and Bikini Atolls in the southern Pacific Ocean and from the Cenozoic era in the Rocky Mountains. As a professor of botany and forest sciences at the University of Washington, she directed the Quaternary Research Center, researched the forest history of the Pacific Northwest, and collaborated with Chinese paleobotanists. Leopold's work as a conservationist includes taking legal action to help save the Florissant Fossil Beds in Colorado, and fighting pollution. She is the daughter and only surviving child of Aldo Leopold.

Leopold was born in Madison, Wisconsin. She graduated with a degree in botany from the University of Wisconsin in 1948, attained her master’s in botany from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950, and completed a Ph.D. in botany from Yale University in 1955, where she studied with Paul B. Sears and Edward Smith Deevey, Jr., two palynological pioneers in the US, and also with G. Evelyn Hutchinson, an internationally known limnologist and ecologist. At Yale, Leopold began to specialize in studying pollen on a dare from an adviser. Her research involved extracting pollen and spores from ancient rocks and sediments and comparing this evidence of fossil plants with those of modern specimens in order to infer what past landscapes and environments were like.

On completing her Ph.D. in 1955, Dr. Leopold took a job with the United States Geological Survey, where she worked for 21 years from 1955-1976. She made important findings about the effects of climate on the evolution and extinction of prehistoric plant species. In her work in the Rocky Mountains, she discovered that extinction and evolution of ancient species into newer varians was more prevalent in the middle of the continent because of the wider degree of seasonal changes; in contrast, coastal areas with more moderate climates supported older species such as the giant redwood. Her work also included studying drilled cores containing pollen from the Miocene Epoch that revealed evidence of a tropical rainforest in the Eniwetok and Bikini Atoll area of the Pacific Ocean. By studying plant fossil records from the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming, Leopold provided inferences about the paleoenvironment of the Paleogene and Neogene periods. The 34-million-year-old plant fossils preserved in the Florissant Valley, southwest of Denver and now part of the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, yielded some of the key evidence for her studies.

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