Amadeus William Grabau was an German-American paleontologist and geologist who was born on January 9, 1870 in Cedarburgh, Wisconsin in the United States and died on March 20, 1946 in Peking, China. He was employed as faculty at MIT and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. In 1901 he became a professor at Columbia University in New York and he later become professor at Peking National University in 1919.