[2][3] Beck's petrel and three taxa of reptiles are named after him, including a subspecies of Galápagos tortoise, Chelonoidis nigra becki from Volcán Wolf.

[6] Rollo Howard Beck was born in Los Gatos, California, and grew up in Berryessa working on apricot and prune orchards.

He participated in early ornithological expeditions to the Sierra Nevada Mountains, Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe with Holmes and Wilfred Hudson Osgood, and collected and helped describe the first eggs and nests of the western evening grosbeak and hermit warbler.

[7] In the spring of 1897, Beck headed south to Santa Barbara, California, where he learned to sail a moderate-sized schooner under captain Sam Burtis.

While in Tring, he planned future potential collecting trips to Colombia for Rothschild, and he returned to California by way of Washington, DC, in order to apply for the necessary permits.

Besides Beck, the expedition's scientists were: Alban Stewart, botanist;[12][13][14] W. H. Ochsner, geologist/paleontologist/malacologist; F. X. Williams, entomologist/malacologist; E. W. Gifford and J. S. Hunter, ornithologists; J. R. Slevin and E. S. King, herpetologists.

Their extensive collections of some 78,000 specimens allowed the academy as an institution to rise, literally and figuratively, from the ashes of "the great conflagration" that devastated San Francisco.

In 1912, Dr. Leonard Cutler Sanford proposed a larger two-year expedition (that ended up taking five years) to South America for Rollo and Ida, and financed by Mr. F. F. Brewster.

Rollo and Ida Beck retired to the northern California town of Planada, near Merced, where they continued to study natural history and provide specimens of great scientific value.

The work of Beck and other early ornithologists was undertaken primarily to document biodiversity before it was lost forever[20] without being recorded, and to understand the evolution and ecology of organisms from the regions visited during the expeditions.

Some believe that our understanding of global biodiversity and the practice of modern conservation biology, much of which seems to be anti-collecting, owes much to these early collectors who worked so diligently to document and preserve voucher specimens in museums.