Teiichi Kobayashi, professor of paleontology at the Imperial University of Tokyo in the mid-1930s when he was working on Cambrian and Ordovician fossils from the McKay Group in the Columbia Valley.

Archeologist, anthropologist, biologist, geologist or paleontologist, European and North American scientists have, frequently and with assumed privilege, published on artifacts and natural history specimens collected (plundered?) from sites in Asia. In paleontology, Teiichi Kobayashi is one of the few Asiatic scientist who have turned the tables.

In the 1920s and '30s when the Geological Survey of Canada began reconnaissance mapping of the Cordillera, many of the field geologists complained bitterly about the difficulty in getting accurate and speedy identifications of fossils that were necessary to unravel the complicated geology of these mountains. The Chief Geologist of the GSC at the time, George A. Young, was no fan of paleontology and, during his tenure, the Paleontological Division was kept understaffed and underpaid. The few paleontologists were sent in the field to do geological mapping instead of working with fossils. Young derisively dismissed the value of fossils in stratigraphy, "Damn it! A good field man can work out his succession in the field without worrying about shells". So when C.S. Evans began to accumulate numerous collections of Cambrian and Ordovician fossils from shales and limestones of the McKay Group during his mapping work in the mountains along the Columbia River in eastern British Columbia, no GSC paleontologist was assigned responsibility for identifying them. Help, however, arrived from an unlikely source.

In the 1930s Teiichi Kobayashi was a young paleontologist, bright and ambitious, at the Imperial University of Tokyo who specialized on Lower Paleozoic fossils. He was kept busy dealing with the Cambrian and Ordovician fossils gathered by collectors who followed the Japanese imperial armies as they invaded Korea and northern China. But Kobayashi was not content to study Asian fossils only. He cast his eyes across the Pacific and began to borrow collections of Lower Paleozoic fossils from Argentina, Nevada, Alaska, Australia and British Columbia -- including the entire fossil lot Evans had collected from the McKay Group. GSC brass was delighted -- prompt work from a paleontologist they didn't have to pay! Kobayashi published his first paper on B.C. fossils in 1938. This dealt with the Upper Cambrian trilobites of Mt. Jubilee just west of Harrogate. A major monograph on Ordovician fossils of the McKay was delayed by events such as Pearl Harbor and Hiroshima, and it did not appear until 1955. The B.C. fossils spent the war years in the basement of the Imperial University of Tokyo.

Upper Cambrian trilobites from the Columbia River Valley described by Kobayashi in 1938.

Kobayashi's fossil photographs are not particularly good and many of the trilobites he studied are poorly preserved in shale. Nonetheless, his work was important in that he demonstrated that most Late Cambrian and Early Ordovician time was represented in the McKay Group. Until a few years ago, his two papers were the only ones available on trilobites from the McKay Group of eastern British Columbia -- both of them published in English in Japanese journals.