This is Mazon Monday post #226. What's your favorite Mazon Creek fossil? Tell us at email:[email protected].
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In January 1975 edition of the Field Museum Bulletin, there was a small blurb about the donation of a "Huge Coal Age Fossil Collection" to the Field Museum. It was vastly understated. Jerry Herdina (1905-1974) was a retired construction engineer with a love for Mazon Creek fossils. Jerry was a long time member of the Field Museum. He amassed his collection between 1928 and 1973. His collection included fossil insects, spiders, amphibians, shrimp, and scorpions... all the good stuff! A cephalopod (yes, a cephalopod!) and a very nice insect have been named for him.
Huge Coal Age Fossil Collection Donated by Museum Member
An important collection of thousands of coal age fossils taken from strip mines in Will, Grundy, and Kankakee counties has been given to the Museum's Department of Geology by a long-term Museum member, Jerry Herdina of Berwyn.
Herdina, a retired construction engineer for whom geology is a hobby, collected the specimens between 1928 and 1973. Included are fossil insects, spiders, amphibians, shrimps, jellyfish, scorpions, and many others. Herdina ovalis (a small, short-winged insect) and Paleocadmus herdinae (a cephalopod) have been named for Herdina.
Jerry's name (and fossils!) appear in quite a few papers describing Mazon Creek animals. Here, he is in a 1963 Fieldiana Mazon Creek Eurypterid paper. He contributed 18 Mazon Creek Eurypterids to the study!
This rare eurypterid was previously known from the holotype and seven specimens (Kjellesvig-Waering, 1948, p. 17). To this number can be added data from twenty-three specimens. Eighteen of these specimens were collected during ten years of intensive search by Jerry Herdina, of Berwyn, Illinois, and form part of his extensive collection. It includes the largest carapace known (see fig. 44).
Fig. 44. Carapace of Adelophthalmus mazonensis (Meek and Worthen) from the Herdina collection (H-6); × 1.3. This is the largest specimen that has been found.
One of Jerry's finest specimens is named Herdina mirificus, a short-winged insect found in Pit 11. The photo below is from the "Richardson's Guide to the Fossil Fauna of Mazon Creek".
Eugene Richardson, Jr, Curator of Fossil Invertebrates from 1946 until 1983, described Herdina mirificus with Frank Carpenter in the 1971 paper "Additional Insects in Pennsylvanian Concretions From Illinois" in the journal Psyche.
The ironstone nodules from the Francis Creek Shale (Middle Pennsylvanian) of Illinois continue to yield many interesting and significant insects. The specimens described in this paper were obtained in former mine pits in Grundy, Will and Kankakee Counties, and have been made available to us by the following collectors, who have been unusually successful in finding insects: Mr. Jerry Herdina, Berwyn, Illinois; Mr. Joseph Makowski, Chicago; Helen and Ted Piecko, Chicago; Mr. Paul Tidd, Mendota, Illinois; and Mr. and Mrs. Francis Wolff, Park Forest, Illinois. We are most grateful to them for their cooperation in loaning their specimens to us for study and their patience in waiting for the results. Special thanks are extended to Mr. Jerry Herdina and to Helen and Ted Piecko for allowing us to photograph and to make a thorough examination of all the insects in their collections. Subsequent papers in this series will deal with additional specimens which they and other local collectors have found.
Richardson wrote a very nice memorial article for Jerry in the March 1975 edition of the Field Museum Bulletin.
JERRY HERDINA (1905-1974)
by Eugene S. Richardson, Jr.
For years-ever since 1928, when the first strip mines were opened for coal in Will and Grundy counties, Illinois- collectors of the Coal Age fossils thrown up in the spoil heaps have observed a tall, slim figure strolling alone across the tortured landscape. Occasionally he would stoop and pick up a red, hamburger-shaped ironstone concretion and stow it in his collecting bag. This was Jerry Herdina, dean of the Chicago- area fossil collectors. Jerry was a "loner," usually collecting by himself, or with his niece and her husband, the Lambert Schriners. But many other collectors have pleasant recollections of a chance meeting in the hills and a subsequent conversation about fossils.
Jerry, a lifelong friend of the Museum, died on November 25, 1974, two months short of his seventieth birthday. One of his last acts was to give his entire collection of fossils to the Museum. It is a collection already well known to scholars in this country and Europe. All but a few hundred of the 14,191 specimens. are Pennsylvanian fossils from the strip mines, an area of particular research interest to the Museum.
I frequently borrowed specimens from Jerry for study. In a letter to me in April, 1958, he said, "I hope that this is only the first of many loans of specimens. We hope to get out in the field soon and do some more intensive hunting. It is our ambition to build up a collection of which we may be proud." In this, Jerry and the Schriners succeeded notably. And now that the collection is housed here, it is one of which the Museum is proud.
His parents were Joseph Hrdina, a cabinetmaker, and Marie Benes, his wife, who came to Chicago directly from Bohemia early in this century. They lived first at 25th and Whipple, where Jerry was born on Jan. 25, 1905. In a few years, the family moved to a large frame house on 21st Place near Karlov, in the same neighborhood. Jerry continued to live there for about fifty years, long after the death of his parents, and and it was there that I first saw his collection, in 1955. As a boy, Jerry walked a few blocks to the Daniel J. Corkery Grade School, and later to the Carter H. Harrison High School. In one of his school- books, a Spanish grammar, his name is still spelled Hrdina, the correct Bohemian form; he was in his early teens when his father. added the vowel as a concession to neighbors who expected one.
In his formative years, Jerry's interests were broad, embracing many aspects of nature. This interest brought him often to the Museum, and later to the Aquarium and Planetarium. He had a speaking knowledge of Spanish and Czech, and a scholar's interest in the local history of Illinois and Utah. Upon graduation from the University of Illinois at Urbana shortly before the depression, he went to work for the Ryerson Steel Company in Chicago as an engineer. The steelwork for many bridges and tall buildings in the Chicago area, including that for Marina City, was fabricated from his calculations. Jerry never married, and devoted his off-hours to the meticulous care of his house and garden, to accumulating a notable reference library, and most particularly to collecting fossils in the strip mines. It was his quiet boast, too, that he had attended every Members' Night at Field Museum.
In 1969 Jerry moved to Berwyn, and it is the immaculate basement of the yellow-brick two-flat that is particularly remembered by paleontologists from Chicago, Harvard, Cal Tech, and European universities. The specimens were all in uniform white pasteboard boxes on steel shelves, arranged by species and locality. It was easy to find them.
Such a large and carefully assembled collection naturally included some unique specimens. In the slow grinding of the mills of science, some of these have been put on record. Two of them, important species new to science, were named for Jerry Herdina during his lifetime. Herdina mirificus, a short-winged insect; and Paleocadmus herdinae, a nautilus-like creature, embody his name in theirs in acknowledgement of the significance of his collection.
His name also appears on the map of the United States. For years, Jerry spent his annual vacation in southern Utah, prowling about the country that has now become Arches and Capitol Reef national monuments, and Canyonlands National Park. He wandered far from the established trails, charting the way to wonders unknown even to the rangers, and recorded their unspoiled beauty in hundreds of sharp, brilliant, and impeccably composed color slides. Today, a portion of Arches. National Monument is marked "Herdina Park" on the National Park Service map in tribute to his volunteer trailblazing.
After Jerry's death, his sister, Mrs. Helen Poncar, gave the Museum, in his memory, all of his books and color slides. Many of the books have found a place in the general library, but most significantly a large number form the nucleus of a new library in the Museum's Department of Education. The 3,539 color slides, all carefully numbered and catalogued, will also be maintained in Education as a valued resource for programs in ecology, geology, and paleontology.
Jerry's many friends on the Museum staff will long remember his friendly interest in their work, and his books, pictures, and fossils will long continue to be actively used, as he meant they should be.
