Education
Grinnell was graduated from Pasadena High School in 1893 and enrolled in Throop Polytechnic Institute (now California Institute of Technology) that autumn, where he received his Bachelor's degree in 1897.
In 1901 Grinnell received his Master's degree from Stanford University. At Stanford, he met several influential people, among them were Edmund Heller. Heller would later join an expedition to Peru in 1915 to explore newly discovered ruins of an Incan civilization at Machu Picchu.
During his time at Stanford Grinnell formed the plan for a list of birds of California. He worked on that project for the next 38 years. He was finishing the third installment to Bibliography of California Ornithology when he died in 1939.
Grinnell supported himself at Stanford by teaching at Palo Alto High School and working in Stanford's Hopkins Seaside Laboratory. At Hopkins, Grinnell taught embryology in the summer of 1900 and in the summers of 1901 and 1902, ornithology.
Typhoid fever interrupted Grinnell's academic track and he returned to Pasadena in 1903 to recover. Grinnell accepted an offer as biology instructor at Throop Polytechnic during this time. Grinnell finished his Stanford Doctorate requirements—essentially by mail—with submission of his thesis An Account of the Mammals and Birds of the Lower Colorado Valley with Especial Reference to the Distributional Problems Presented and received his Doctorate in Zoology on May 19, 1913.
Students of Grinnell's biology class at Throop included Charles Lewis Camp and Joseph S. Dixon. Charles Camp would become the director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Joseph Dixon would join John Thayer's sponsored expedition in 1913 to Alaska. The Thayer expedition almost perished when their ship became locked in ice 7 nautical miles (13 km) off the coast, east of Point Barrow until the summer of 1914. Dixon collected specimens during this time, including a new species of gull, Larus thayeri which was named for the expedition's sponsor.
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