Chapman Grant was born in
Salem Center,
New York, the son of
Jesse Root Grant II, the youngest son of the 18th
President of the United States Ulysses S. Grant. In 1892 he moved to
San Diego with his parents. As a child, he spent time at the
California Academy of Sciences, where he developed his interest in science. He graduated from
Williams College in 1910. He became the assistant curator of entomology at the Children's Museum of the
Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences in September 1913. In November 1913, he left the museum for a military career beginning on the Mexican border. He was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant in the 14th U.S. Cavalry. He married Mabel Glenn Ward in 1917. He continued his scientific studies while in the Army. When he was assigned as commandant of the
Reserve Officers' Training Corps at
the University of Wichita in the 1930s, he wrote scientific papers on herpetology and was curator at the Arkansas Valley Museum and Historical Society. He retired with a rank of
major. In the 1930s and 1950s several expeditions for the
San Diego Natural History Museum and the
Illinois Museum of Natural History led him to the study of the
Caribbean herpetofauna where he described fifteen new
taxa, including the
blue iguana, the
cotton ginner gecko,
Gaige's dwarf gecko,
Klauber's dwarf gecko,
Nichols' dwarf gecko,
Roosevelt's dwarf gecko,
Townsend's dwarf gecko,
Cook's anole, the
Culebra Island giant anole,
Cochran's croaking gecko, the
web-footed coqui,
Cook's robber frog, and the
whistling coqui. Two
West Indian snakes are named in his honor:
Chilabothrus granti and
Typhlops granti. In 1932 he established the scientific publication
Herpetologica, the quarterly journal of the
Herpetologists' League, an association of several notable herpetologists in the US, which he co-founded in 1936. He was also the publisher of a second magazine - Scientists Forum. In 1982 the Major Chapman Grant Hall of Ecology in the
San Diego Natural History Museum in
Balboa Park was named in honor of him. In 1983 he died at the age of 95 in a nursing home at
Escondido, California. He left one son, Ulysses S. Grant V (September 21, 1920 – March 7, 2011). ==Works==