Charles Emerson Beecher was an American Paleontologist most famous for the first excavation and study of the Beecher's Trilobite Beds and eventually rising to Curator of Geological Specimens at the Yale Peabody Museum. Beecher began collecting fossils from local sandstones and shales when his family moved to northwestern Pennsylvania, resulting in a collection of fossil phyllocarids and freshwater unionids prior to his studying for an undergraduate degree from University of Michigan (B.S. 1878).