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Jack went into Oregon State looking to major in forestry as he wanted to work at national parks. He ended up majoring in Fish and Game. -
Instead of being drafted as a soldier into WWII, he decided to join the Advanced Army Air Corps flying school, which is now the Air Force. He was in the military for 3 years and never flew in combat. -
After coming back from his time in the military, he found out that the US Fish and Wildlife Service opened an office at Oregon. He jumped on the oportunity to join -
While at Stanford, he met a lady named Mitzi Sigall whom he asked out and eventually married. They were married at the Stanford Chapel. -
Jack had always wanted to go to Stanford and had worker hard at Oregon to get grades good enough to have a chance at grad school there. With money from the GI bill, he was able to attend. He was accepted into the doctoral program and eventually got his PhD in biology. -
As he described in his autobiography, he noticed Mitzi started to become depressed and he tried to help her. Then, shortly after she asked him for a divorce. Jack didn't understand why and she would not tell him. -
Jack was offered at job at the University of Florida at Gainesville to teach general biology. This would allow him to pursue the teaching career that we wanted while having the time and resources to conduct research. -
Jack met another woman at the University of Florida named Terry Beecher. They ended up getting married a year after meeting. -
Jack received an offer to become a professor at the Texas Institute of Marine Biology. This gave him less teaching duties and better access to research equipment so he happily accepted the job. -
Jack sent a proposal to the National Scienence Foundation for support to write a book on Marine Zoogeography. He was approved for a grant of $10000 and he helped get 14 papers published between the years of 1961-1964. -
He was offered a position on the chair Of the committee on Oceanography by the President, Allen (no last name specified). Without a defined role on what he was supposed to do, he spent his time with the committee working to promoting the cause of oceanography. -
when the talks of digging the Panama Canal began, there were many speculations about things that could go wrong. Biologist Ira Rubinoff published an article were she talked about how this would be the "greatest Biological experiment in man's history." Jack responded with two published articles, the first one pointing out how this would likely result in the extinction of several thousands of species. The second one went into much greater detail about the matter. -
Jack did not give much detail about his second divorce. Terry had custody of all the kids and two of them went to live with jack for a year then went back to live with Terry. -
Back at USF, Jack met a women Named Eila Hanni, she was a young economist who had come to the United states from Finland to get her education. They ended up getting married and stayed together for life. -
Jack took a position as a professor at USF and at the same time Eila was able to get a job there, managing the schools finances. -
jack revieced and invite to do research at the Vostok Biological Station near Vladivostok. He continued to do research in biology there. His main takeaways from the trip were about the depressing nature of the country and its lack of freedom. -
When Jack got back from the USSR, he applied to do research on zoogeography at nasa while he was on a sabbatical for a year. He published a work called the Centers of Orgin in Biogeography -
Jack began work with two students at USF on the embryology of seahorses and pipefishes with one and with the other the life history of the blacktip shark. They published paper on both subjects -
During Jack's time at NASA, one major topic of debate at many of the conferences was the extinction of dinosaur. This culminated at one conference were Nobel Prize winning physicist Luis Alvarez debated with many paleontologists on how important an asteroid impact was to the extinction and whether it was the main reason for it. -
Jack was offered a position on a NASA Committee on the Evolution of complex life. During his time here, he researched the impacts that extraterrestrial phenomena might have had on the development of multicellular organisms. -
When Jack turned 65, he was offered to stay full time at USF or to retire and take a part time position. Jack decided to retire and take a part time job there. This allowed him to fully devote the time he spent at work to research. -
This work was also supported by NASA's grant. In this work, he displayed the research he did in the history of the earth and the tectonic plates movement. This allowed him to further his knowledge into biogeography and to later publish more papers on the subject. -
based on this previous work on zoogeography, he wrote this book to take a closer look at some specific examples of what he had been studying. -
Even as he retired, he still wanted to pursue his interest in marine biology. When the Indo-Pacific Fish conference for 1989 was announced to be in New Zealand, he jumped on the chance to go. -
While Jack never devoted majority of this time to paleontology, over the years his research had lead him to doing research in paleontology. He published another work called Global Extinctions, Recoveries, and Evolutionary Consequences, which looked at much of the paleontology research he did and synthesized it with his other research -
Jack wanted to expand on this work Biogeography and plate tectonics, so he began work on a book called Global Biogeography. This work took all of the research he had done throughout his career and all the papers he had written and brought on the subjectit all together into one publication -
This was the work of the NCEAS, over the next few years, Jack would publish many papers that would become published in this collection of Works. He published more works about tectonic plates, research about biogeography and its relationship to ecology and a few other things. -
Panbiogeography is an offshoot of biogeography and Jack was invited to submit an article on in for the Russian Journal of Marine Biology. -
In 2009, Jack published his autobiography, A Professorial Life, where he talked about his life and all of his research -
After the publication of Jack's autobiography, he settled down in a house in palm springs CA with Eila. They spent most of their time there, with frequent visits to Finland where Eila still had a house.
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Jack passed away peacefully in his sleep in April of 2018 when he was 98 years old.