AASP Primary Records Program

Tate Ames

Herbert Tate Ames, former editor of the Catalog of Fossil Spores and Pollen, died in May at the age of 67. He had resided in State College, Pennsylvania, after retirement from The Pennsylvania State University in 1983.

Tate was born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 18, 1924. He graduated from Wesley Hills High School in Massachusetts and entered college at Brown University. World War II interrupted his studies, and he served in the U.S. Army Air Force. In 1948 he received an A.B. degree from Brown. In 1949 he entered the University of Massachusetts, where his career in palynology began.

At the University of Massachusetts, he studied palynology with L. R. Wilson, and in 1951 received his M.S. degree, having completed a thesis on "Plant microfossils in a Colorado Cretaceous coal." Tate's thesis dealt with the palynoflora of the Laramie Formation (Maastrichtian) near Como, Colorado. In his samples he carne across a palynomorph of undescribed morphology that later carne to be known as Aquilapollenites. Tate then attended Louisiana State University, where he began a Ph.D. dissertation on the palynoflora of the Wilcox Group (Paleocene and Eocene) in Louisiana. During that time he served as a geologist for Louisiana Wildlife and Fisheries, was Assistant Curator at the L.S.U. Geological Museum and was briefly an instructor at Florida State University.

Tate joined the Penn State staff in 1956 as a Research Assistant in the Coal Research Section. There he served as Associate Editor of 41 volumes of the Catalog of Fossil Spores and Pollen (CFSP) and four volumes of cumulative indexes to the CFSP, as Co-Editor of three volumes of the CFSP, and as Editor of two volumes of translations. The CFSP, which ceased publication in 1985, was at one time the primary source of taxonomic and nomenclatural information for stratigraphic palynology.

Douglas J. Nichols