Person

Baker, Frank Collins, 1867-1942

1867-1942

Frank Collins Baker was born on December 14, 1867, in Warren, Rhode Island. 

He was an American malacologist and ecologist. He developed an interest in seashells during his childhood, when his seafaring grandfather brought them for him to play with. After attending a small business college and spending a year at Brown University, he received a Jessup Scholarship to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia in 1889, where he studied under Henry Pilsbry and participated in an expedition to Mexico. Following several years of work at Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, Baker became a curator at the Chicago Academy of Science from 1894 to 1915. During his time there, he authored the two-volume "Mollusca of the Chicago Area" (1898, 1902) and a monograph on the Lymnaeidae (1911). A shift in the research environment at the Chicago Academy prompted Baker to join the newly established New York College of Forestry at Syracuse University for three years. During this period, he completed his extensive study of Oneida Lake. In 1918, Baker accepted a curatorship at the University of Illinois Museum of Natural History in Urbana. Here, he completed his "Life of the Pleistocene or Glacial Period" (1920), the two-volume "Mollusca of Wisconsin" (1928), "Fieldbook of Illinois Land Snails" (1939), and a monograph on the Planorbidae, which was published posthumously in 1945.

In 1892, he married Lillian M. Staley. He died on May 7, 1942, in Champaign, Illinois.