Donald E. Savage
Donald Elvin Savage , called Don Savage , (born May 28, 1917 in Floydada , Texas , † April 5, 1999 ) was an American paleontologist . He was the director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology (UCMP) at Berkeley.
Life
Savage grew up in Canyon, Texas and began his studies in Texas (at what is now West Texas A&M University ) with a bachelor's degree in 1937. Even then, he turned to vertebrate paleontology and received his master's degree from the university in 1939 of Oklahoma . Afterwards, his studies were interrupted by military service in the Second World War with the US Air Force, where he dealt with aerial photo analysis and mapping. In 1946 he continued his studies at the University of California, Berkeley continued and was with a dissertation on mammal fauna of 1,949 Pleistocene in the San Francisco Bay area doctorate . At Berkeley he was a student of Ruben Arthur Stirton .
He then became a member of the faculty in Berkeley and was at the Museum of Paleontology, whose director he was from 1966 to 1971 as the successor to Stirton. From 1966 to 1975 he headed the Faculty of Paleontology. 1971/72 he was President of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology , of which he became an honorary member in 1989. In 1988 he retired, but remained scientifically active.
He was particularly concerned with Tertiary mammalian fossils , studied biostratigraphy, and in 1964 used potassium-argon dating of volcanic rock to date mammalian fossils. He developed refined methods of making casts with the museum staff and later looked for small fossil remains of vertebrates from the late Cretaceous and early Tertiary in the western United States using refined sieving and washing techniques . In continuation of the field research of Stirton, he dug in Colombia ( Tatacoa desert ) and compared the tertiary mammal fauna uncovered with that in Patagonia . In the 1960s he and DE Russell dug for mammals in the Eocene of France and later also in the Eocene of southwest Wyoming and Burma . He was particularly interested in the early evolution of primates in the Eocene.
Fonts
- with DE Russell: Mammalian Paleofaunas of the World, Addison-Wesley 1983
Web links
References and comments
- ↑ J. Evernden, G. Curtis, GT James, Savage, American Journal of Science, 262, 1964, pp. 145-198
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Savage, Donald E. |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Savage, Donald Elvin (full name); Savage, Don |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American paleontologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | May 28, 1917 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Floydada , Texas |
| DATE OF DEATH | April 5, 1999 |