Nationality American Name Margaret Bancroft | Died August 30, 1986 Fields Natural history | |
Institutions San Diego Natural History Museum Institution San Diego Natural History Museum | ||
Margaret R. Wood Bancroft (1883, Glasgow, Kentucky - 1986, San Diego, California), was an American naturalist and explorer of Baja California.
Biography
Born on July 10, 1893 in Glasgow, Kentucky, Margaret Wood was raised on a ranch in the San Diego back country and was briefly a silent movie actress (1913-1917), working with Hobart Bosworth, Dustin Farnum, Mack Sennett, D.W. Griffith, and Mabel Normand.
She married ornithologist and oölogist Griffing Bancroft (son of historian Hubert Howe Bancroft) in 1917 and was active in the social and political life of San Diego County, with membership in the Red Cross, the Junior League, and the San Diego Society of Natural History. In 1930, she participated in a five-month journey to explore and document the bird and animal life of the Baja California coastline. The expedition included ornithologist Adriaan Joseph van Rossem (California School of Technology), zoologist Donald Ryder Dickey (California School of Technology), F. S. Rogers (San Diego Natural History Museum), Albert Kroeckel, and J. Elton Green (University of California, Berkeley); Griffing Bancroft published a memoir of the journey in 1932, The Flight of the Least Petrel.
In 1935, Bancroft led a small expedition to search for the legendary lost mission of Santa Ysabel in the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, Baja California. She discovered cave symbols that contributed to archaeological study of the migration of ancient Native American tribes. Bancroft traveled extensively on oölogical and archaeological expeditions to Baja California, Sonora, and the islands of the Gulf of California.
Interested in many areas of natural history, Bancroft collected snake specimens for the herpetologist Laurence Klauber; in 1943, he named a new subspecies of Sonora semiannulata after her, Sonora bancroftae (San Telmo ground snake). From snake specimens Bancroft collected in 1932 on Isla San Geronimo, Baja California Norte, herpetologist Charles Shaw identified the species Anniella geronimensis (1940).
In 1971, Bancroft donated the Griffing Bancroft Library, with significant volumes on the history of the West, California, and Baja California, to the University of California, San Diego. She died in La Jolla, San Diego, California, on August 30, 1986.