J. William Schopf

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James William Schopf (born September 27, 1941 in Urbana , Illinois ) is an American paleontologist and internationally recognized specialist in the earliest forms of life on earth (Precambrian paleobiology). He is also engaged in paleobotany . His botanical-mycological author's abbreviation is " JWSchopf ".

Schopf studied at Oberlin College ( Bachelor's degree in 1963) and Harvard University , where he received his master's degree in 1965 and his doctorate in biology with Elso S. Barghoorn in 1968 . He was then Assistant Professor and from 1973 Professor of Paleobiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). From 1984 he was director of the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life , which he founded.

In 1965 he and Elso S. Barghoorn published about 1 billion year old stromatolites from the Australian Bitter Spring Formation, which revitalized the field of research after a standstill following the first discoveries by Barghoorn and Tyler in 1954. In 1993 in Western Australia (Apex Chert, Warrawoona Group) he discovered traces of life of unicellular organisms that are 3.5 billion years old, the oldest fossils to date. However, its interpretation as traces of life of cyanobacteria was questioned by Martin D. Brasier (Oxford) in 2002 and interpreted as chemical hydrothermal formations.

From 1969 to 1982 he was a member of the Space Science Advisory Committee of NASA and from 1968 to 1971 part of the NASA team to investigate the moon rock. In 1997 he received the NASA Group Achievement Award . He was a member of international stratigraphy commissions for the Precambrian and the Cambrian- Precambrian border .

In 1974 he received the Charles Schuchert Award . In 1989 he received the AI ​​Oparin Medal from the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, in 1986 the Mary Clark Thompson Medal from the National Academy of Sciences, in 1977 the Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation and in 1966 the New York Botanical Garden Award . In 1973 and 1988 he was Guggenheim Fellow and 1997 Senior Research Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. From 1973 to 1987 he was co-editor of Origins of Life magazine . In 2012 Schopf was awarded the Paleontological Society Medal , and in 2013 the Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal .

Schopf is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , the National Academy of Sciences , the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Philosophical Society, and the Linnean Society of London. He is the brother of Thomas JM Schopf .

Fonts

  • Cradle of life. The discovery of the earth's earliest fossils , Princeton University Press 1999
  • Editor: Life's origin. The beginnings of biological evolution . University of California Press 2002
  • Publisher: Earth's earliest biosphere: its origin and evolution , Princeton University Press 1983
  • Editor: Evolution! Facts and Fallacies , Academic Press 1999
  • Editor: Major events in the history of life , Jones and Bartlett 1992 (UCLA Symposium 1991)
  • Editor with Cornelis Klein: The proterozoic biosphere: a multidisciplinary study , Cambridge University Press 1992
  • Editor with Charles Marshall: Evolution and the molecular revolution , Jones and Bartlett 1996
  • Solution to Darwin's dilemma: Discovery of the missing Precambrian record of life, Proc. NAS, 97, 2000, 6947

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life and career data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ Barghoorn, Schopf, Science, Volume 150, 1965, p. 337
  3. ↑ Schopf, Science, Volume 260, 1993, pp. 640-646.
  4. ↑ Brasier et al. a. Questioning the evidence for earth's oldest fossils , Nature, Volume 416, 2002, pp. 76-81, abstract
personal data
SURNAME Schopf, J. William
ALTERNATIVE NAMES JWSchopf (botanical author abbreviation)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 27, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Urbana , Illinois