Dale Russell

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Dale Alan Russell (born December 27, 1937 in San Francisco , California - December 21, 2019 ) was a Canadian paleontologist who worked on dinosaurs .

Career

Russell graduated from the University of Oregon (1958) and the University of California, Berkeley ( Masters Degree 1960) and received his PhD in Geology from Columbia University in 1964 . As a post-doctoral student , he was at Yale University in 1964/65 . From 1965 he was curator for vertebrate paleontology at the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa , where he was director of the palaeobiology department from 1977. From 1995 he was a senior curator at the Natural History Museum at North Carolina State University . There he also has a professorship in the Faculty of Geosciences. He has now retired. He was an adjunct professor at California State University in Sacramento . In 1996 he received the Bancroft Award from the Royal Society of Canada .

Russell was involved in the very productive dinosaur excavation in Alberta ( Dinosaur Provincial Park ) and in the 1980s with Philip J. Currie and Dong Zhiming organizer of a Canadian-Chinese joint project for dinosaur excavations. He named different types of dinosaurs, including the tyrannosaurid Daspletosaurus and various dinosaurs that he had found during excavations in China.

He speculated early on about extraterrestrial causes for the extinction of the dinosaurs (at that time still a supernova ) and speculated on a hypothetical intelligent end product of the dinosaur revolution, if these had not become extinct, a dinosauroid (after Russell most likely arose from Troodon ), as did Carl Sagan in Dragons of Eden (1977). He also published on the implications of paleontological research for the question of extraterrestrial life.

Fonts

  • Islands in the cosmos. The evolution of terrestrial life , Indiana University Press 2009
  • An Odyssey in Time. The Dinosaurs of North America , University of Toronto Press 1989

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ https://twitter.com/tomholtzpaleo/status/1216002980576665601
  3. ^ Dale A. Russell: China and the lost worlds of the dinosaurian era , Historical Biology, Volume 10, 1995, pp. 3-12
  4. ^ Russell, Wallace Tucker: Supernovae and the Extinction of the Dinosaurs , Nature, Volume 229, 1971, pp. 553-554
  5. ^ Russell, R. Séguin: Reconstruction of the small Cretaceous theropod Stenonychosaurus inequalis and a hypothetical dinosauroid , Syllogeus, Volume 37 1982, pp. 1-43
  6. ^ Exponential evolution: implications for intelligent extraterrestrial life . Advances in Space Research, Volume 3, 1983, pp. 95-103. He is also preparing a book for the University of Indiana Press (2010)
personal data
SURNAME Russell, Dale
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Russell, Dale Alan (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH December 27, 1937
PLACE OF BIRTH San Francisco , California
DATE OF DEATH December 21, 2019