Bryan Patterson

This article is about the paleontologist Bryan Patterson. For other people, see Brian Patterson .

Bryan Patterson (born March 10, 1909 in London , † December 1, 1979 in Chicago ) was an American paleontologist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and at Harvard University .

Life

Bryan Patterson was the son of engineer John Henry Patterson and lawyer Frances Gray Patterson. In 1926 he became a vertebrate taxidermist at the Field Museum in Chicago under Elmer S. Riggs , in large part due to his father's influence. He was largely self-taught in paleontology, geology, and biology (he attended lectures in Chicago and received his training as a paleontologist while working at the Field Museum). Even then he was concerned with tertiary mammal fauna from Argentina, Riggs' field of work at the time. In particular, he dealt with Notoungulata , later also with fossil crocodiles, Phorusrhacos and guinea pig relatives (with Albert E. Wood in the 1970s). In 1937 he became a curator for paleontology and in 1938 a US citizen. In 1942 he became curator for mammals. During the Second World War he was a simple GI in the 1st US Infantry Division in Europe and was (shortly before the Battle of the Bulge) a German prisoner of war. In 1947 he became a lecturer for geology at the University of Chicago in addition to his work as a curator. From 1952 to 1954 he did research on tertiary mammals in Argentina as a Guggenheim fellow. In 1955 he became Agassiz Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University . In 1958 he was on excavations after Therapsiden of the Triassic with Alfred S. Romer in Argentina, 1970 in Guatemala (at the invitation of the government, the Museo de Paleontologia Bryan Patterson emerged from the excavations ) and 1976/77 in Sao Paulo.

In addition to his work in South America, he studied mammals in the Eocene and Paleocene of western Colorado, which led to the discovery of new groups of early ungulates and new knowledge about Taeniodonta . He also worked on early mammals from the Cretaceous North Texas and mammalian finds from the Pliocene and Pleistocene of Kenya, including the first fossil discovered from Australopithecus anamensis

In 1956 Patterson was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He had been a member of the National Academy of Sciences since 1963 . In 1948 he was president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology , of which he became an honorary member in 1975.

Fonts

• Rates of evolution of taniodonts, in G. Jepsen, E. Mayr, G. Simpson, Genetics, Paleontology and Evolution, Princeton University Press 1949, 243-278
• Early Cretaceous mammals and the evolution of mammalian molar teeth, Fieldiana Geol., 13, 1956, pp. 1-105
• Prehistoric Life, Doubleday 1959
• with Rosendo Pascual: Evolution of mammals on southern continents. V. The fossil mammal fauna of South America. Q. Rev. Biol., Vol. 43, 1968, pp. 409-451
• The fossil mammal faunas of South America. In: A. Keast, FC Erk, B. Glass, Evolution, Mammals and the Southern Continents, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1972, pp. 247-309

literature

• Everett C. Olsen, Biographical Memoirs National Academy 1985

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Bryan Patterson and William W. Howells: Hominid Humeral Fragment from Early Pleistocene of Northwestern Kenya. In: Science . Volume 156, No. 3771, 1967, pp. 64-66, doi: 10.1126 / science.156.3771.64 .