Karl Mensch Waage ’39

Distinguished paleontologist and former director of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale, Karl died Oct. 18, 1999. He earned his master's and PhD in geology at Princeton. During WWII, he worked with the US geological survey looking for clays rich in aluminum. In 1946, he joined the faculty at Yale as professor and curator of invertebrate paleontology and remained there until he retired in 1986.

Apart from running the museum and helping to train a generation of geologists and paleontologists in 40 years at Yale, Karl was chiefly interested in his research, which took him to Colorado, Wyoming, and the Dakotas in the summers. He meticulously reconstructed the community of marine invertebrates that inhabited the inland sea that covered much of central North America over 100 million years ago.

Karl met his wife of 57 years, Elizabeth King, in Princeton, where she was working at Miss Fine' s School. Their sons became Princetonians, Jonathan K. '66 and Jeffery K. '75, and Karl's grand-niece, Melissa Waage '01, is at Princeton now. We, along with his family and the friends and students whose lives were touched by Karl, give thanks for the warmth and genuine concern he brought to us all.

The Class of 1939