Samuel Stillman Berry

This article is about the zoologist Samuel Stillman Berry. For other meanings, see Berry (disambiguation).

Samuel Stillman Berry (March 16, 1887 - 1984) was a U.S. marine zoologist specialized on cephalopods.

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He was born in Unity, Maine (between Waterville and Bangor), but the family home was the Winnecook Ranch in Montana, which had been founded by his father Ralph in 1880. In 1897, he moved with his mother and two cousins to Redlands, California.

Berry received a B.S. (1909) from Stanford and his M.S. (1910) from Harvard. He then returned to Stanford for his Ph.D. work on cephalopods and got his doctorate in 1913.

From 1913 until 1918, he worked as a librarian and research assistant at the Scipps Institution for Biological Research in La Jolla, California. This was the last paid employment he ever held in academia—all his later studies and expeditions were financed by the profits from the family ranch in Montana.

Despite his independent status, he became a renowned malacologist, publishing 209 articles and establishing 401 mollusc taxa. Most of his work dealt with chitons, cephalopods, and also land snails.

Berry also had an interest in horticulture, where he concentrated on the hybridization of irises and daffodils. For some time, from the 1920s until the late 1940s, he even ran a horticultural business from Winnecook Ranch, which he had taken over after the death of his father in 1911. In 1917 he became the president of the Winnecook Ranch Company, a post he occupied until his death in 1984.