She worked at the
Museum of Comparative Zoology at
Harvard University in the 1890s and again during the 1910s.[4][2] While at the museum, she helped create exhibitions and cataloged fossils.[4] She would eventually donate her own fossil collection to the museum.[4]
Between 1896 and 1903, she worked as an instructor of paleontology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[4][1][2] Throughout this period, she did illustrations for and assisted many paleontologists, such as
John Mason Clarke, the State Paleontologist of New York.[8]
In 1907, she began work as an instructor in paleontology at Barnard College, where she would earn several degrees.[2] In 1909, as her master's thesis, she edited and published
Gerard Troost's unpublished
monograph on the
crinoids of
Tennessee (1850).[9] Her work was cited well into the 1970s.[10] She became Curator in Columbia's Geology Department in 1909.[2]
In 1917, she became the Assistant Curator in Paleontology at the
American Museum of Natural History in New York, but after an accident in the same year, became
disabled.[2] She continued to construct models for the museum and create illustrations for scholarly publication from her home in Massachusetts.[11][2][12]
In 1898,
Amadeus William Grabau named horn coral fossil Hadrophyllum woodi in her honor.[14] Charles D. Walcott named the Middle Cambrian fossils Aluda woodi and Coscinocyathus elvira in her honor.[15][16]
Wood, Elvira. A new Crinoid from the Hamilton of Charlestown, Indiana, American Journal of Science, Vol. XII, October 1901, pp. 1–14. Pl. V.
Wood, Elvira. On New and Old Middle Devonic Crinoids, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, Washington D.C., August 6, 1904, pp. 56–84, Pl. XV-XVI.
Wood, Elvira. A Critical Summary of Troost's Unpublished Manuscript on the Crinoids of Tennessee, Smithsonian Institution United States National Museum Bulletin 64, Washington D.C., 1909, pp. 1–150, Pl. 1–15.
Wood, Elvira. The Phylogeny of Certain Cerithidae, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume XXIV, New York, May 1910, pp. 1–92, Pl. I-IX.
Wood, Elvira. The Use of Crinoid Arms in Studies of Phylogeny, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Volume XX, New York, 1914, pp. 1–14, Pl. I-V.
Wood, Elvira. The Ancestry and Descendants of Ebenezer Wood of West Gouldsborough, Maine, Springfield Printing and Binding Company, Springfield, Mass. 1930.
^"Columbia Joyful At Commencement Old Boys Come Back to Give a Circus as 1,140 Graduates Get Their Degrees". The New York Times. May 28, 1908. p. 8.
^"Columbia Records Its Greatest Year Largest Graduating Class, Millions in Gifts, and More Alumni Back for Commencement". The New York Times. June 2, 1910. p. 7.
^Paul, C. R. C. (1972).
"Cheirocystella antiqua"(PDF). Brigham Young University Geology Studies. 19: 45. Archived from
the original(PDF) on July 19, 2021. Retrieved March 20, 2021.
^Walcott, Charles Doolittle (1913).
Research in China in three volumes and atlas. The Carnegie Institution. pp. 60–61, 228.
OCLC496255202. 'The specific name is given in recognition of the excellent and thorough preparatory work that was done by Miss Elvira Wood in the preliminary study of the Cambrian fossils from China and her work upon the Devonian crinoids, [page 228]