Hyla regilla, the Pacific tree frog, is a miniature, cold-blooded, furless creature, yet it ranges all the way from the plains of the San Joaquin Valley to the highest passes of the Sierra Nevada. Grinnell admired it for its ubiquity. The tree frog is small, but its voice is huge.

There seemed to be 3 or 4. Sometimes they would abruptly cease their chorus, remain silent for a minute or more until the listener had forgotten all about them, and then break in suddenly with startling effect from their raucous cries. These were of two sorts, the ordinary rapid “K-r-r-ë-k—Ka,” and then a long drawn out rasping “K-r-r-r-e-e-k,” all one syllable. The performers evidently imitate one another, for in chorus, the cries are always normally of the same sort.

I picked up the shrew. He was weightless in my hand. Sorex is the genus of the long-tailed shrews, and the tail of this one, indeed, was long. Shrews are nocturnal hunters with poor vision, and the eyes of No. 22021 were so insignificant that in his stuffed pelt I could detect no eyes at all. The pointy, insectivorous snout bristled with vibrissae, however. These long, whiskery sensors had guided the shrew as he raced ravenously through the night.

I stroked the shrew twice with my thumb. The square inch of pelt was a minimal tactile experience. It did nothing to explain the contrarian impulse in montane shrews. I was still completely in the dark as to why this species, of all the fauna of the Sierra, was going against the grain of the general migration upward. I returned No. 22021 to the ranks. Uncorking the vial behind him, I upended it gently and let his skull slide into my palm. Alas, poor Sorex. Near the orbits, the Lilliputian skull was paper thin and translucent. Grinnell had written “22021” in elfin numbers across the top of the cranium. To witness the nanocalligraphy of Grinnell and his colleagues, inscribed on museum labels and on crania, is to revise upward one’s estimate of how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Joseph Grinnell wrote essays on natural history, he wrote tall stacks of field notebooks, he wrote monographs, he wrote great tomes cataloguing the creatures recorded on his surveys, yet here, displayed on the pate of the shrew, was his essential oeuvre, a vast literature writ tiny on small skulls.

“So here comes Grinnell with mathematical perspectives on change in characteristics through time in populations across geography. Grinnell was already seeing changes in California’s fauna a hundred years ago, and he set out to document what the record was in his day.” — JAMES PATTON

“In vertebrate biology, he is probably the most important person from an academic institution in the early 20th century,” Jim Patton told me. “There is hardly a mammalogist or ornithologist in this country that doesn’t trace his academic lineage to Grinnell.”

Patton certainly traces his own lineage back to that fountainhead. James L. Patton spent 32 years as curator of mammals at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology, the house that Grinnell built. He is emeritus now, at 64, but he maintains a toehold at a desk in the museum offices. It was there that we spoke. Patton is a wiry welterweight—weathered by a career of collecting in the tropics—balding, with a close-cropped gray beard. He was born, like many of our best earth scientists, in the Midwest. There is a trace of Missouri still in his accent.

“Grinnell shaped how we practice our discipline, but he also had a profound conceptual influence. Some of the keystone concepts in ecology, for example, are traced to him. The concept of the ecological niche. The concept of competitive exclusion—that no two species can occupy the same niche for a period of time without one excluding the other.

“In many quarters back then, a kind of a typological view of nature prevailed. A species was thought to be a kind of an archetype, and any divergences were just variants around that archetype. Other museums of the time were interested in ‘postage-stamp’ collecting—the collection of one individual of every species, with the idea that one individual can represent that species. And Grinnell said ‘no!’ One individual can’t represent the species. You have to have a pool of individuals from multiple localities.”

In 1911, three years after the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology was founded, Grinnell began his first epic survey, an eight-year study of the multiple localities of the “The Yosemite Transect,” a cross section of the Sierra Nevada through Yosemite National Park. On this training ground, Grinnell’s workers—Tracy Storer, Joseph Dixon, Charles Camp, and Walter Taylor among them—grew into eminent field naturalists in their own right. Grinnell and Storer collated the team’s findings into Animal Life in the Yosemite, a 741-page inventory of the creatures they had found.

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