Edmund Otis Hovey
American geologist (1862–1924)

Edmund Otis Hovey (September 15, 1862 – September 27, 1924) was an American geologist specialising in volcanoes, earthquakes and meteorites. He made his greatest impact as curator of geology at the American Museum of Natural History.
Early life and career
Hovey was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and he began studying geology through the amateur interests of his father — the Rev. Horace Carter Hovey, a Presbyterian minister. The family travelled throughout Hovey's teens exposing him to a range of landscapes across the United States. He first studied at Yale University before becoming a school teacher. For the next few years he managed both teaching and postgraduate study, gaining his doctorate under James Dwight Dana in 1889. He was appointed assistant curator at the American Museum of Natural History in 1894, after organising a successful mineralogical exhibition at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago. He was promoted to associate curator in 1901, and eventually became Curator of Geology and invertebrate paleontology in 1910.
Fieldwork and expeditions
Hovey travelled extensively to study geological phenomena and was often accompanied by his wife, Esther Lancraft, who would write up the more prosaic aspects of their travels.
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This entry incorporates text from “Edmund Otis Hovey” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.