Donald E. Russell

Donald Eugene Russell (* 1927 in Idaho ) is an American vertebrate paleontologist specializing in early mammals.

Russell studied at Oregon State University in Corvallis and - interrupted by four years of military service in the Korean War - made his master's degree in paleontology in 1956 with Donald Savage at the University of California, Berkeley , where he studied mammals of the Oregon Pliocene . In 1957 he went to France, where he received his doctorate on Eocene vertebrates from the Champagne region in 1964 at the University of Paris and at the Natural History Museum of Paris . He stayed at the Natural History Museum in Paris(Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle), where he retired in 1992. In France, he introduced new sieving methods from the USA in the 1950s to look for small mammalian fossil remains. He later also improved the method of making plastic casts of fossils, using plastics similar to those in dentistry, which also allowed detailed studies under the electron microscope.

Russell carried out field work in Morocco, Pakistan (where he and Gingerich first described the early precursor to the Eocene whale Pakicetus ), China and Venezuela (where his group made the first dinosaur discovery in the country).

In 2005 he received the Romer Simpson Medal of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology , of which he was an honorary member since 1997.

He is married to the French paleontologist Denise Sigogneau, a specialist in mammal-like reptiles at the CNRS .

Web links

• Portrait of Russell by Naomi Lubeck, 2005