Wendell P. Woodring's father, James Daniel Woodring, was a minister in the
Evangelical Association and became the president of
Albright College. (The college is named in honor of the Evangelical's Association's founder,
Jacob Albright.) After James Daniel Woodring died in 1908, his widow raised their six children under difficult financial circumstances. Wendell P. Woodring graduated in 1910 at age 19 from Albright College and then taught high school science in
St. James, Minnesota. Beginning in 1912 he studied geology at Johns Hopkins University and received his doctorate there in 1916. As a graduate student he was influenced by Charles Kephart Swartz (1861–1949) and
Harry Fielding Reid. Woodring's doctoral dissertation, entitled
The Mollusca of the Bowden Beds of Jamaica, is on marine
bivalves and
scaphopods of the
Miocene from
Jamaica. The two referees for the dissertation were
William Bullock Clark and
Edward W. Berry. While Woodring was a graduate student he also worked for the
United States Geological Survey (USGS). From 1927 to 1930 he spent three years as a professor of invertebrate paleontology at
Caltech. There he became a close friend of
Chester Stock, Ralph Daniel Reed (1889–1940), and Kenneth E. Lohman (who graduated from Caltech in 1929, was one of Woodring's undergraduate students, and became a leading expert on diatoms). In 1930 Woodring resigned from Caltech, because he greatly preferred field work to teaching. In honor of Woodring's contributions to science,
Preston Cloud and
Philip Abelson organized the Woodring Conference on Major Biologic Innovations and the Geologic Record. The Woodring Conference, attended by twenty-three scientists from various disciplines, was held from the 14th to the 16th of June 1961 at
Big Meadows Lodge, Virginia. Woodring was elected a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1925. He was for the academic year 1948–1949 president of the
Paleontological Society and for the academic year 1953–1954 president of the
Geological Society of America. and in 1953 a member of the
American Philosophical Society. He received in 1949 the
Penrose Medal, in 1967 the
Mary Clark Thompson Medal, and in 1977 the
Paleontological Society Medal. In 1952 he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Albright College. Wendell and Josephine Woodring had two daughters, Julia Worth Woodring (1920–2005) and Jane Hurst Woodring (1922–1954). In 1944 their elder daughter married Robert Milton Armagast (1914–2005), who became a professor of industrial arts at
Adams State University in Colorado. Wendell P. Woodring, upon his death in 1983, was survived by his first daughter and three Armagast grandchildren. After his wife Josephine died in 1964, Wendell Woodring married in 1965 Merle Crisler Foshag, who died in 1977. ==Eponyms==