Robert M. Kleinpell: Founder of the Berkeley School of Stratigraphic Paleontology

Robert M. Kleinpell (1905-1986) has been called the founder of a ‘Berkeley School of West Coast Cenozoic Stratigraphic Paleontology’. Through his personal experiences in carrying out oil exploration in California's Cenozoic stratigraphic successions, his extensive inquiry into the fundamentals of stratigraphic paleontology, and his teaching activity while held in a Japanese prison camp during World War II, Kleinpell developed the basic ingredients for his school of stratigraphic paleontology. His school attracted numbers of students interested in obtaining employment in the oil industry when Kleinpell joined the Department of Paleontology at University of California, Berkeley, in 1953. Kleinpell told his students that the first step toward a basic understanding of stratigraphic geology came from field mapping and recording of all relevant data. The data included collecting fossils from precisely-positioned stratigraphic levels. The fossil occurrence information was then plotted carefully to ascertain associations of taxa that appeared to be unique. The associations that appeared to be unique in time, based on their stratigraphic positions (Kleinpell came to term these ‘congregations’), were used to recognize zones and stages. Kleinpell was firm in his conviction that the zones and stages that he and his students recognized in American West Coast Cenozoic strata were closely similar in principle to the zones and Zonengruppe of Albert Oppel who had worked with ammonite faunas in the European Jurassic. Kleinpell did not publish a diagram or definition of the zones that he espoused because, he said, Oppel had already defined that type of zone. Hollis Hedberg, Kleinpell's former fellow-student in graduate study at Stanford, did include a discussion of the ‘zone’ of Oppel and Kleinpell in the 1976 International Stratigraphic Guide. Subsequent international and American stratigraphic guides and codes have omitted Hedberg's discussion and illustration of the Oppel zone. The West Coast Cenozoic zones and stages, recognized using the methodology established by Oppel, are a primary characteristic of the Berkeley School of Stratigraphic Paleontology.