He was born in
Hopkinton, Iowa, the eldest child of postmaster, store proprietor, and
American Civil War veteran Charles E. Merriam. His middle name Campbell was his mother's middle name, and the maiden name of his maternal grandmother. Both his father Charles E. Merriam and his paternal uncle Henry C. Merriam had served as officers in the 12th Iowa Infantry, Company K; after capture at the
Battle of Shiloh, they were sent to
Libby Prison for some time before being returned to the battlefields. Eventually, when the two brothers were mustered out, they returned to Iowa, married, and raised families. As a young man, he began collecting
Paleozoic invertebrate fossils near his
Iowa home. He received a bachelor's degree from
Lenox College in
Hopkinton, Iowa, his father's
alma mater, then went to the
University of California to study
geology and
botany under
Joseph Le Conte. He later went to
Munich,
Germany, to study under the famous paleontologist
Karl von Zittel. In 1894 he returned to the U.S. and joined the faculty at the University of California, teaching and performing research in both vertebrate and invertebrate
paleontology. In 1901 one of his lectures on paleontology inspired the young
Annie Montague Alexander, who financed and took part in his expedition that year to
Fossil Lake in
Oregon. Alexander, who went on to a lifelong career as a paleontological benefactress, financed his subsequent expeditions to
Mount Shasta in 1902 and 1903, as well as his famous 1905
Saurian Expedition to the
West Humboldt Range in
Nevada. During this expedition Merriam unearthed 25 specimens of
ichthyosaur, many of them considered the finest ever found. In 1903 he was recognized as an Associate Member of the
Boone and Crockett Club, a wildlife conservation organization founded in 1887 by
Theodore Roosevelt and
George Bird Grinnell. In 1912 he was appointed chairman of the Department of Paleontology at the University of California. That same year he began his famous studies of vertebrates at the La Brea Tar Pits. He and his students categorized many of the vertebrate fossils found at the site, and many more were placed in storage. The smilodon was later established as the California
state fossil. In 1914 Merriam was elected to the
American Philosophical Society. In 1918 he was elected to the United States
National Academy of Sciences. That same year, he co-founded the
Save the Redwoods League, which began significant preservation efforts after Merriam traveled the Redwood areas of
Humboldt County, California in 1922 seeking to spare its old-growth the effects of logging he witnessed in Redwood forests closer to San Francisco. A biography, which details his efforts to preserve wild lands in California and throughout the United States, was published in 2005. In 1919 Merriam served as president of the
Geological Society of America. In 1920 he was appointed Dean of Faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, but he left that same year to become president of the
Carnegie Institution in
Washington, D.C. His departure caused the university to combine the Paleontology Department with the
Geology Department, angering Merriam's benefactress, Annie Alexander, who subsequently founded and endowed the university's
Museum of Paleontology. As the head of Carnegie Institution, Merriam's administrative duties led to a reduction in his research for the rest of his career. He accomplishments as president included helping to advance the educational programs of the
National Park Service, as well as helping to preserve the
California redwoods. He was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1921. His published papers are collected in a four-volume set published in 1938 by the Carnegie Institution. Merriam was a founding member of the
Galton Institute and a cautious political supporter of
eugenics. Notably, his paternal first cousin
Frank Merriam, the eldest child of Civil War veteran Henry C. Merriam, served as the 28th Governor of California between 1934 and 1939. ==Education and University Degrees==