Wendell Phillips Woodring (13 June 1891, Reading, Pennsylvania – 29 January 1983, Santa Barbara, California) was an American paleontologist and geologist.
Wendell P. Woodring graduated in 1910 at age 19 from Albright College and then taught high school science in St. James, Minnesota.
After returning to the United States in April 1922, he was employed by the Tropical Oil Company to work as a paleontologist on Colombia's Caribbean coast.
With the support of an informal agreement between the USGS and the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Woodring extended his dissertation research to gastropods with publication in 1925 under the title Miocene Mollusks from Bowden, Jamaica: Pelecypods and Scaphopods.
There he became a close friend of Chester Stock, Ralph Daniel Reed (1889–1940), and Kenneth E. Lohman (who graduated from Caltech in 1929, was one of Woodring's undergraduate students, and became a leading expert on diatoms).
One basic motivation was oil exploration, but Woodring and Bramlette's work became immediately important for engineering geologists because landslides were common there.
From 1941 to the end of WW II, Woodring was headquartered at UCLA during his work for the U.S. federal government as a petroleum geologist in California.
After WW II ended, he went back to Washington D.C. at the USGS Headquarters in the Stratigraphy and Paleontology Division at the National Museum of Natural History.
The Woodring Conference, attended by twenty-three scientists from various disciplines, was held from the 14th to the 16th of June 1961 at Big Meadows Lodge, Virginia.
In 1944 their elder daughter married Robert Milton Armagast (1914–2005),[11] who became a professor of industrial arts at Adams State University in Colorado.