FURLONG, Eustace Leopold
FURLONG, Eustace Leopold (1874-1950), curator of paleontology at California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, and friend of fellow vertebrate paleontologist, Chester Stock. In 1928 Furlong and Chester Stock made excavations on the northwest coast of Santa Rosa Island and described the Santa Rosa mammoth as a new species, Elephas exilis. In the September 1930 Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History Leaflets, director Ralph Hoffmann reported: “An expedition from the museum spent three days in August near the mouth of Arlington Canyon, about five miles from the westernmost point of the island. It was in this general region, in Pleistocene formation, that Dr. E. L. Furlong of the California Institute of Technology collected in 1928 remains of a small elephant.” Furlong died on January 19, 1950. He is buried next to his wife, Ida Jane (1877-1952) in Woodland Cemetery, Yolo County, California.
- 1928. Stock, Chester and E. L. Furlong The Pleistocene Elephants of Santa Rosa Island, California Science 68(1754):140-141, August 10, 1928
- 1929. Stock, Chester & E. L. Furlong Pleistocene Elephant on Santa Rosa Island, California (abstract) Geological Society of America Bulletin 40(1):175, 1929
In the News~
March 2, 1928 [BDGZ]: “Proof that Santa Rosa Island, one of the Santa Barbara chain, was at one time thehome of elephants was offered members of the Paleontological Society of America, Pacific Coast Branch, at its meeting here today by Chester Stock and E. L. Furlong, both former members of the University faculty and now affiliated with the California Institute of Technology. Remains of the elephants were found in Pleistocene deposits on the island as early as 1873, but a thorough search of the island, the classification of material and a decision on its significance have just been completed…”
January 5, 1930 [LAT]: “How did they get there? Remains of ancient elephants and their long-nosed kin are being unearthed everywhere it seems, even on Santa Rosa Island. This is the second largest of four islands to the westward of Santa Barbara, upon which Dr. Spencer Atkinson and J. A. Barbieri, of Pasadena, recently recovered an elephant skull. Since then Professor Chester Stock and E. L. Furlong, of the California Institute of Technology, have collected an assortment of elephant fossils—enough to show that quite a herd of small-sized pachyderms inhabited the island during Pleistocene times. ‘One curious feture of the occurrence,’ says Professor Stock, ‘is the apparent total absence of associated mammalian types.’ Since the channel is twenty miles wide and over 600 feet deep, the absence of other animals, such as sabertooth tigers and lions, is more easily understood than the presence there of pachyderms.”
