USGS Scientist Sergius Mamay; Led Research on Plant Fossils

Sergius H. Mamay, 87, a U.S. Geological Survey paleobotanist who used plant fossils from more than 250 million years ago to understand how the natural world changed, died of coronary atherosclerosis March 26 at Suburban Hospital in Bethesda.

Dr. Mamay, who wryly described himself as the world's only left-handed, Japanese-speaking, glockenspiel-playing paleobotanist, was one of the world's experts on Permian period plant fossils.

"He's someone of very great stature," said William A. DeMichele, a curator of paleobiology at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, where Dr. Mamay was a research associate for many years. "He basically pioneered the whole area of fossil plants in the southwestern United States. . . . He would take plants he was finding and put them in context."

He dug up scores of fossils, at least once using a bulldozer to collect a gigantic set of specimens, and then puzzled out how the appearance of a particular plant in a particular place at a particular depth could explain what was going on in the environment at the time.

"What his studies did indirectly was to show plants were strongly controlled by environment and not as much by age," said Dan Chaney, a Museum of Natural History research associate who worked closely with Dr. Mamay.

Dr. Mamay wrote some of the most influential papers ever published by an American paleobotanist, his colleagues said, and he described new taxa and flora of the late Paleozoic age in the western United States. A family of fossil plants and three genera were named for him. He was also dubbed one of the "three Sergeis" for whom the species Neuralethopteris sergiorum was named.

But before he went to graduate school, he had never even seen a fossil.

Dr. Mamay rectified that quickly, doing his thesis on Iowa coal balls. Coal balls are masses of petrified peat that never quite turn into coal, and he found in them invertebrate debris, which he and a colleague, Ellis L. Yochelson, determined were marine snail shells. But coal doesn't form in salt water, so the fossils' appearance showed that salt water had invaded the peat bogs.

"It added a level of environmental dynamism," DeMichele said. The discovery also was valued by mining companies whose operators try to avoid the coal balls, which can interrupt a lucrative coal seam.

A man of many talents, Dr. Mamay had a photographic memory, perfect pitch and a sense of humor about the many ways his name was incorrectly rendered. Reprints of his latest papers were found not just in libraries but among the clutter of Litwin's secondhand furniture store in downtown Washington. Dr. Mamay had befriended the owner while buying an ornate desk that once belonged to Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter.

Sergius H. Mamay was born May 20, 1920, in Akron, Ohio, into the Russian-speaking household of two factory workers. "Serge" learned to play the piano as a child and, with perfect pitch and an ability to improvise, he played and paid his way through college at the University of Akron. He studied science but also took four years of Latin in high school, two years each of German and French and a year of Spanish in college. World War II interrupted his education, and he angled for an assignment to the Army Medical Corps. His piano playing attracted the attention of the camp band members, however, and he spent much of the war playing popular music at USO dances and the cymbals and glockenspiel in the military marching band.

In 1944, he applied for language training and was sent to Yale University, where he became fluent in conversational Japanese. He did further study at the University of Michigan, and after the war ended, he stayed in the Army to serve in Tokyo during the occupation, until the end of 1946. The University of Akron accepted his Army training as credit, and he graduated while in uniform.

Within months, he started graduate school at Washington University in St. Louis, where he received a master's degree in 1948 and a doctorate in botany in 1950. He received a Guggenheim fellowship to study at Cambridge University in England the following year. He was recruited there for the U.S. Geological Survey, which he joined in 1951 and from which he retired 31 years later.

"Serge was relentless. He kept turning out one new thing after another," DeMichele said. "He did a lot of work in Gigantopteris: He described one after another of these plants, six or seven genera of them."

Stricken with diabetes in the 1960s, he kept meticulous records of fluctuations in his blood sugar. He fished for bluefish and striped bass in the Chesapeake Bay and was a gardener and collector of handcrafted cabochon bolos (for the western tie) and belt buckles. Dr. Mamay was primarily a quiet man who had a well-developed willingness to mentor younger scientists.

He was a 50-year fellow of the Geological Society of America, a member of the Paleontological Society and a past member of the Cosmos Club. In retirement, he worked a regular schedule at the Smithsonian and oversaw the paleobotanical and Geological Survey library.

Survivors include his wife of 54 years, Hermoise Mamay of Bethesda; two children, Patricia Conklin of Orlando and Gregory Mamay of Tumon, Guam; and a sister.