Jacob Boll

Born in Bremgarten, Aargau, Switzerland, Boll emigrated to Texas first in 1869. He then temporarily lived in Massachusetts and Switzerland, and later settled in the Dallas area in 1874. He went on to make key contributions to the understanding of Texas paleontology and entomology. From 1876 through 1880 he discovered over 30 fossil species in Texas dating to the Permian period. He also collected a wide variety of modern-day butterflies, moths, grasshoppers, reptiles, fish, and mollusks in the state. He provided Texas-sourced specimens for Edward Cope (now held in the American Museum of Natural History) and to Louis Agassiz (now at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard).

Current faculty at SMU, Louis Jacobs and John Lewis, provided this poem that Boll left on the back of a specimen now at the American Museum of Natural History:

Now you will with some few others
Trek to the professor’s seat.
Awakened through his careful thought,
Be reassembled from your fragments,
To tell to others yet to come
From the sculpting of your teeth
How you lived and disappeared,
Name you he will, and what he found.