Colinvaux, Paul Alfred

Person

Colinvaux, Paul Alfred

1930-2016

Paul Colinvaux was an ecologist, zoologist and professor emeritus at Ohio State University. He was among the last generation of "explorer" scientists, exploring the Alaskan and Siberian Arctic, the Galapagos Islands, and the Amazonian jungle on a mission to discover the history of the climate.
Colinvaux was born on September 22, 1930 in St. Albans, England. He grew up in London during the Battle of Britain, studying, even as a boy, the ecology of plant regrowth in the craters left by German bombs. He attended University College School in London, where his activities included rowing in the Princess Elizabeth Challenge Cup at Henley Royal Regatta.
After graduating from UCS, Colinvaux served in the British Army of the Rhine in occupied Germany as a Second Lieutenant, Royal Artillery, 42nd Regiment. After leaving the army, Colinvaux studied at Jesus College, Cambridge completing his BA in 1956 and his MA in 1960.
After graduating, he emigrated to New Brunswick, Canada, where he was employed by a government soil survey and where he met his wife, Llewellya Hillis. Hillis and Colinvaux emigrated to the United States where Colinvaux earned his Ph.D. as a paleoecologist in 1962 from Duke University.
Colinvaux extracted fossilized pollen from the bottom of ancient lakes as a tool to investigate climate conditions at the end of the last glacial maximum. The pollen buried in the mud could then be dated and used to identify pre-historic climate conditions. In a pre-Google Earth era, without benefit of GPS technology, Colinvaux explored in the old ways, quizzing tribal fishermen and local traders, interviewing bush pilots, and poring over aerial maps to identify sectors of jungle to search for tiny, unmapped lakes undisturbed by streams or human activity. His research was instrumental in laying the foundation for modern thinking and research on Amazonian species diversity. In 1966, he discovered a new species of flower in the Galapagos, which was subsequently named for him (Passiflora colinvauxii), as was the Galapagos diatom, Amphora paulii.
After completing post-doctoral studies at Yale University, Colinvaux and Hillis both took up appointments in the Department of Botany & Zoology at Ohio State University in 1964. He became Professor Emeritus in zoology there from 1964 until 1991. In 1971 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. His skill as an orator was renowned. During his years at Ohio State University, Colinvaux won every teaching prize that could then be awarded for undergraduate teaching and he was the recipient of the Ohio State University Distinguished Scholar Award in 1985. During the Vietnam-era student uprising and occupation of Ohio State in May 1970, Colinvaux addressed, impromptu, a throng of demonstrating students, using the power of his voice and words to disperse the crowd. In 1991 Colinvaux and Hillis left Ohio State University to take positions with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. They then moved to Woods Hole, Massachusetts, where they were affiliated with the Marine Biological Laboratory.
Colinvaux was the author of several books. His most famous 1979 book 'Why Big Fierce Animals are Rare' uses the second law of thermodynamics to argue that big meat-eating animals are rare because the available energy in each step in the food chain is degraded. In 1973 he authored the first undergraduate textbook in Ecology, which was used, in various editions, to educate generations of students He is also the author of 'The Fates of Nations: A Biological Theory of History' (1980) and a scientific memoir 'Amazon Expeditions: My Quest for the Ice Age Equator' (2008).
In 2013, he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Quaternary Association. He died on February 28, 2016 on Cape Cod, Massachusetts, leaving two children (Catherine and Roger) and four grandchildren.

Obituary for Paul Colinvaux published in The Columbus Dispatch on Mar. 28, 2016: https://www.legacy.com/obituaries/name/paul-colinvaux-obituary?pid=179279106