Elias Howard Sellards (1875–1961) was born in Kentucky but moved to Kansas as an adolescent. He received the B.A. (1899) and M.Sc. (1901) degrees from the University of Kansas and a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1903. He taught at Rutgers College, the University of Florida, Gainesville, and the University of Texas at Austin. He was the first state geologist of Florida (1907–1918), and he was staff geologist (1918–1925), acting director (1925–1932) director (1932–1945), and director emeritus (1945–1961) at the Texas Bureau of Economic Geology. From 1938 to 1957, he was simultaneously director of the Texas Memorial Museum. His broad interests included Paleozoic paleobotany and palynology, Paleozoic insects, vertebrate paleontology, early humans in the Americas, and meteorites, to mention several. He made notable contributions to the study of the Permian floras of Kansas and to the study of seed ferns, establishing with David White, Felix Oliver, and others the gymnospermous nature of that group. He named the Permian genus Glenopteris and also named the fructification Codonotheca. He also advanced the study of fossil cockroaches and of economic geology, vertebrate paleontology, and anthropology of Florida and Texas.

Maxim Konrad Elias was an important paleobotanist, paleontologist, and biostratigrapher. He was born in Minsk, Russia, as Maxim Konradovich Eliashevich. He received the degree of Engineer of Mines from the Imperial School of Mines, St. Petersburg, in 1917 and worked at the Ural Mining Institute and as a coal company geologist. In 1920 he moved to Vladivostok, where he taught at the Polytechnic Institute and was a member of the Russian Geographical Society. He came to the United States in 1922. Elias was a geologist with the Kansas State Geological Survey from 1927 to 1937 and became a U.S. citizen in 1930. In 1938 he led a geological exploration party in Colombia, South America. He received a Ph.D. from Yale University in 1939. He was paleontologist with the University of Nebraska Conservation and Survey Division from 1939 to 1958 when he retired and became adjunct professor at the Research Institute, University of Oklahoma, Norman. He died in Alliance, Nebraska, May 6, 1982, at the age of 93.