Eustace Leopold Furlong (1874-1950) was a paleontologist and fossil preparator noted for his work on ancient mammals and the Mesozoic reptiles of California.
Furlong was born to a family with deep roots in the California area and spent his childhood in San Francisco.
He became involved in Mesozoic reptile work once more during the late 1930s and early 1940s due to Chester Stock's expeditions into the Panoche Hills during this time.
His father, Matthew William Furlong of Rhode Island, was a sea captain who came to California seeking his fortune in the gold fields.
Eustace attended San Francisco public schools and prior to enrolling at UC Berkeley, spent a considerable amount of time mining in the Sierra Nevada (probably with his father).
As a student at Berkeley, Herbert accompanied Merriam on two trips to the John Day region of Oregon and led a successful expedition to Crater Lake in Shasta County.
Like his brother, Eustace made trips to the John Day and to Shasta County helping to collect specimens.
This first one, from the September 2, 1905, evening edition (page 1), announced his secret marriage to Ida Hopper in Jackson, California, (apparently he had told no one about it) but it also describes some of his paleontology work.
His specialty is paleontology, and his original researches in this line have resulted in discoveries of great interest to the scientific world.
This summer Mr. Furlong was again assigned to work in the Shasta regions, but before beginning his scientific researches he stopped at Ione to claim his promised bride.After the ceremony, Furlong took his new wife to Shasta County for a somewhat unconventional honeymoon: she got to watch Eustace busy himself with his field work.
Aided by Eustace Furlong, an instructor in the Department of Anthropology [poor reporting], he fought the flames, which started on the third floor, with buckets of water placed in the hall for just such emergencies.
These finds, which represent the latest and most important work in anthropology [sigh] in America, could never have been replaced had the fire once swept through the building.
The damage is nominal.So the entire fossil collection that had been amassed by Joseph Le Conte and Merriam up to that time could have been completely destroyed if not for Furlong and an alert janitor!
[1] By the time Furlong left the museum in 1910 to try his hand at real estate, he had published six papers, five of them on Pleistocene cave fauna.
[1] In 1945, Furlong was invited up to the University of Oregon to prepare and study fossil mammals collected in the John Day Basin.