Eric Delson

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Eric Delson, 2011

Eric Delson (* 1945 in New York City ) is an American geologist and palaeontologist who researches the evolution of old world monkeys - especially the vervet monkey relatives - and the human race . Delson is since 1980 Professor of Anthropology at Lehman College of the City University of New York (CUNY). After the turn of the millennium, "Professor Delson made a name for himself as one of the pioneers in the development of computer-aided methods for the three-dimensional analysis, reconstruction and visualization of hominid remains."

education

Eric Delson acquired in 1966 at Harvard College the bachelor -degree specialist physics and in 1973 at Columbia University the doctoral -degree in field vertebrate paleontology. In 1972/73 he held a teaching position in anthropology at the University of Pittsburgh , which was followed by a teaching position from 1973 and from 1980 a professorship in anthropology at Lehman College and the CUNY Graduate School in New York City. Since 1975, Delson is also for the Department of Vertebrate - Paleontology of the American Museum of Natural History operates in New York City.

Research topics

Eric Delson during excavations in Senèze, July 2006

For his doctoral thesis , Eric Delson already examined the relationship between fossil monkeys and those living today. His studies culminated in 1979 in the work Evolutionary History of the Primates , published jointly with Frederick S. Szalay , which was described in a specialist journal in 1980 as the most comprehensive overview of primate fossils at the time and for which it read in 2011: "Eric Delson's publications on the history of the development of the Primates are still regarded as standard works today . "

Delson became internationally known in 1984 as the initiator of a symposium and the unique public exhibition Ancestors, four million years of humanity in New York, at which "all the important original fossils" of early hominini could be seen in one place and directly compared. Another standard work is the Encyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory , first published in 1988 with Ian Tattersall and revised in 1999 , in which an encyclopedic overview of the human tribal history was available for the first time and in which knowledge of the geology of the Cenozoic and geochronology with archaeological ones and paleontological findings had been linked. In 2004 Delson and Ross MacPhee founded the book series Vertebrate Paleobiology and Paleoanthropology published by Springer-Verlag .

From 2000 to 2007 Delson and French colleagues led excavations in the area of ​​the Pliocene large mammal site of Senèze , a hamlet near Brioude ( Haute-Loire department ) in France . This site has been known since 1892, but the age of the fossils had not been determined using modern dating methods until the turn of the millennium .

At the same time, in cooperation with colleagues from the University of California, Davis and Stony Brook University, he developed methods by means of which morphometric 3D data from monkey fossils can be used to reconstruct their skull shapes on the computer and to gain clues about the appearance of mosaic shapes . For this purpose, Delson developed the PRIMO (PRImate Morphometrics Online) database , in which the morphometric 3D data collected by his working groups are made available online.

From 1986 to 1989 Delson was joint editor with Peter Andrews of the Journal of Human Evolution , which during this time developed into the leading international specialist publication in the field of paleoanthropology. He was a founding member and has been Secretary of the Paleoanthropology Society since 1999 (until 2013) and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science since 2002 . He is also a member of the American Association of Physical Anthropologists , the Paleontological Society , the Society for the Study of Mammalian Evolution, the Society for the Study of Evolution , the American Anthropological Association, the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, the Society for Systematic Biology , the American Association for Zoological Nomenclature, and Sigma Xi an.

Eric Delson was the author of the first description of Prohylobates simonsi and co-author of the first description of Dryopithecus wuduensis .

Fonts (selection)

  • Early Wasatchian mammals from the Powder River Local Fauna, Eocene of northeast Wyoming. In: Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History , Volume 146, 1971, pp. 406-462
  • Evolutionary History of the Cercopithecidae. In: Contributions to Primatology , Volume 5, 1975, pp. 167–217, full text (PDF; 1.4 MB)
  • with Peter Andrews : Evolution and interrelationships of the catarrhine primates. In WP Luckett, FS Szalay (Ed.): Phylogeny of the Primates: A Multidisciplinary Approach. Plenum, New York 1975, pp. 405–446, full text (PDF; 843 kB)
  • with Niles Eldredge and Ian Tattersall : Reconstruction of hominid phylogeny: a testable framework based on cladistic analysis. In: Journal of Human Evolution , Volume 6, 1977, pp. 263-278, doi: 10.1016 / S0047-2484 (77) 80051-1 , full text (PDF) . Published in Chinese in: Zhou Mingzhen, Chang Meeman and Liu Xiaobo (Eds.): Cladistic Systematics , 1983, pp. 100–113
  • Catarrhine phylogeny and classification: principles, methods, and comments. In: Journal of Human Evolution , Volume 6, 1977, pp. 433–459, doi: 10.1016 / S0047-2484 (77) 80057-2 , full text (PDF; 403 kB)
  • with Elwyn L. Simons : Cercopithecidae and Parapithecidae. In VJ Maglio and HBS Cooke (eds.): Evolution of African Mammals. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1978, pp. 100–119, full text (PDF; 751 kB)
  • Prohylobates (Primates) from the Early Miocene of Libya: A new species and its implications for cercopithecid origins. In: Géobios , Volume 12, No. 5, 1979, pp. 725–733, doi: 10.1016 / S0016-6995 (79) 80099-6 , full text (PDF; 228 kB)
  • with Frederick S. Szalay: Evolutionary History of the Primates. Academic Press, New York 1979, ISBN 978-0126801507
  • Fossil macaques, phyletic relationships and a scenario of deployment. In: DG Lindburg (Ed.): The Macaques: Studies in Ecology, Behavior and Evolution. Van Nostrand, New York 1980, pp. 10-30
  • with Alfred L. Rosenberger: Are there any anthropoid primate living fossils? In: N. Eldredge and S. Stanley (eds.): Living Fossils , Springer Verlag, New York 1984, pp. 50–61, full text (PDF; 339 kB)
  • Cercopithecid biochronology of the African Plio-Pleistocene: correlation among eastern and southern hominid-bearing localities. In: Courier Research Institute Senckenberg , Volume 69, 1984, pp. 199-218
  • Ancestors: The Hard Evidence. AR Liss, New York 1985, ISBN 0845102494
  • Human phylogeny revised again. In: Nature , Volume 322, 1986, pp. 496–497, doi: 10.1038 / 322496b0 , full text (PDF; 49 kB)
  • with Elizabeth Strasser: Cladistic analysis of cercopithecid relationships. In: Journal of Human Evolution , Volume 16, 1987, pp. 81-99
  • One source not many. In: Nature , Volume 332, 1988, p. 206, doi: 10.1038 / 332206a0 , full text (PDF; 53 kB)
  • with Xue Xiang-Xu: A new species of Dryopithecus from Gansu, China. In: Kexue Tongbao , Volume 33, Beijing 1988, pp. 449-452 (Chinese); in: Chinese Science Bulletin Volume 34, No. 3, 1989, pp. 223–229 (English), full text (PDF; 186 kB)
  • Chronology of South African australopith site units. In: FE Grine (Ed.): Evolutionary History of the “Robust” Australopithecines. Aldine De Gruyter, New York 1988, pp. 317-324
  • with Terry Harrison and Guan Jian: A new species of Pliopithecus from the Middle Miocene of China and its implications for early catarrhine zoogeography. In: Journal of Human Evolution , Volume 21, 1991, pp. 329-361, doi: 10.1016 / 0047-2484 (91) 90112-9
  • with David Dean: Second gorilla or third chimp? In: Nature , Volume 359, 1992, pp. 676-677, doi: 10.1038 / 359676a0 , full text (PDF)
  • Evolution of Old World monkeys. In: JS Jones, RD Martin, D. Pilbeam and Sarah Bunney (Eds.): Cambridge Encyclopedia of Human Evolution. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1992, pp. 217–222, full text (PDF; 257 kB)
  • Theropithecus specimens from Africa and India and the taxonomy of the genus. In: N. Jablonski (Ed.): Theropithecus: Rise and Fall of a Primate Genus. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993, pp. 157-189
  • with Lowell Dingus et al .: Mammals and Their Extinct Relatives: A Guide to the Lila Acheson Wallace Wing. American Museum of Natural History, New York 1994
  • with Ian Tattersall et al. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of human evolution and prehistory . Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Routledge, 2nd edition New York / Oxford 1999, ISBN 978-0815316961
  • with CJ Terranova et al .: Body mass in Cercopithecidae (Primates, Mammalia): Estimation and scaling in extinct and extant taxa. In: Anthropological papers of the American Museum of Natural History , Volume 83, 2000, pp. 1–159, full text (PDF; 2.5 MB)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c 10. Gustav Heinrich Ralph von Koenigswald Lecture. In: SENCKENBERG - Nature • Research • Museum , Volume 141, No. 9/10, 2011, pp. 286–287
  2. ↑ Fossil colobine monkeys of the Circum-Mediterranean region and the evolutionary history of the Cercopithecidae (Primates, Mammalia). Ph. D. dissertation, Columbia University, 1973
  3. ^ Frederick S. Szalay and Eric Delson: Evolutionary History of the Primates. Academic Press, New York 1979, ISBN 978-0126801507
  4. ^ Glenn C. Conroy: Evolutionary history of the primates. In: International Journal of Primatology , Volume 1, No. 4, 1980, pp. 411-415, DOI: 10.1007 / BF02692283
  5. ↑ Eric Delson (ed.): Ancestors, the hard evidence: proceedings of the symposium held at the American Museum of Natural History April 6-10, 1984 to mark the opening of the exhibition "Ancestors, four million years of humanity". New York, AR Liss 1985, ISBN 0845102494
  6. ↑ Eric Delson, Ian Tattersall et al. (Ed.): Encyclopedia of human evolution and prehistory . Garland Reference Library of the Humanities, Routledge, 2nd edition New York / Oxford 1999, ISBN 978-0815316961
  7. ↑ primo.nycep.org
personal data
SURNAME Delson, Eric
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleoanthropologist
DATE OF BIRTH 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City