Margaret Wood Bancroft


Margaret R. Wood Bancroft, was an American naturalist and explorer of Baja California.

Biography

Born on July 10, 1893 in Glasgow, Kentucky, Margaret Wood was raised on a ranch in the San Diego back country and was briefly a silent movie actress, working with Hobart Bosworth, Dustin Farnum, Mack Sennett, D.W. Griffith, and Mabel Normand.
She married ornithologist and oölogist Griffing Bancroft in 1917 and was active in the social and political life of San Diego County, with membership in the Red Cross, the Junior League, and the San Diego Society of Natural History. In 1930, she participated in a five-month journey to explore and document the bird and animal life of the Baja California coastline. The expedition included ornithologist Adriaan Joseph van Rossem, zoologist Donald Ryder Dickey, F. S. Rogers, Albert Kroeckel, and J. Elton Green ; Griffing Bancroft published a memoir of the journey in 1932, The Flight of the Least Petrel.
In 1935, Bancroft led a small expedition to search for the legendary lost mission of Santa Ysabel in the Sierra de San Pedro Mártir, Baja California. She discovered cave symbols that contributed to archaeological study of the migration of ancient Native American tribes. Bancroft traveled extensively on oölogical and archaeological expeditions to Baja California, Sonora, and the islands of the Gulf of California.
Interested in many areas of natural history, Bancroft collected snake specimens for the herpetologist Laurence Klauber; in 1943, he named a new subspecies of Sonora semiannulata after her, Sonora bancroftae. From snake specimens Bancroft collected in 1932 on Isla San Geronimo, Baja California Norte, herpetologist Charles Shaw identified the species Anniella geronimensis.
In 1971, Bancroft donated the Griffing Bancroft Library, with significant volumes on the history of the West, California, and Baja California, to the University of California, San Diego. She died in La Jolla, San Diego, California, on August 30, 1986.

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