Jennifer Clack

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Jennifer Alice "Jenny" Clack (* 3. November 1947 , † 26. March 2020 ) was a British vertebrate - paleontologist . She was an expert on early terrestrial vertebrates (in the transition from fish to tetrapods ) and was a curator and professor at the Museum of Zoology at the University of Cambridge until her retirement in September 2015 .

life and work

Clack studied at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne and graduated in 1970 with a Bachelor in Zoology. She then turned to a career in museums, graduating from Leicester University and working at the Birmingham City Museum before turning back to paleontology. She started in 1978 her dissertation on Pholiderpeton (a reptiliomorphe amphibian from the Carboniferous) at the University of Newcastle in Alec Panchen and in 1984 a doctorate . In doing so, she discovered stirrup auditory bones, which, with the discovery of a stirrup in the early tetrapod Greererpeton, led to new insights into the development of hearing in early tetrapods. In 1981 she became an Assistant Curator at the Museum of Zoology in Cambridge. She holds a Master of Arts and a Doctor of Science from Cambridge University . In 2006 she became Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at Cambridge.

In 1987 she found and described a fairly complete fossil ( called Boris by her ) from Acanthostega gunnari (previously only known in fragments) from the upper Devonian of Greenland . Examination of this specimen and other early tetrapods led to new insights into the transition from water to land. Examination of Boris showed that Boris had a fishy tail, eight fingers (instead of the usual five - also a big surprise) and gills , and that his limbs were unable to support his weight on land. The investigations clearly showed that the four limbs of the later terrestrial vertebrates were already trained in their ancestors living in the water and were used for locomotion by paddle movements, in contrast to all previous ideas that these were trained for shore leave.

As a result, many fossils previously classified as fish were re-examined in museum archives and new tetrapods were discovered. Clack was later given the opportunity to re-examine the Ichthyostega specimen found by Erik Jarvik in Greenland , and here, too, it was found that the limbs were unsuitable for shore leave. She found other Acanthostega skeletons and looked in Scotland for fossils from the Romer Gap at the end of the Devonian, a fossil gap that just affected the transition of vertebrates from water to land. It emerged that tetrapod traits were fully formed over 30 million years from the end of the Devonian to the middle of the Carboniferous.

In 1998 she first described Eucritta from the Scottish Carboniferous. In 2002, she identified the 1,971 found in Scotland (and then classified as fish) pederpes as tetrapods. Clack was a Fellow of the Royal Society from 2009 . In 2008 she received the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA and the T. Neville George Medal of the Geological Society of Glasgow. In 2015 she was awarded the Lapworth Medal . She was an honorary doctor of the University of Chicago and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009). She was portrayed in an episode of the TV series Beautiful Minds on BBC4 in April 2012 . Jenny Clack died in March 2020 at the age of 72 from complications from cancer.

Fonts

  • Gaining Ground: the Origin and Early Evolution of Tetrapods , Indiana University Press 2002, 2nd edition 2012
  • Editor with Marcelo R. Sánchez-Villagra: Fossils of the Miocene Castillo Formation, Venezuela: Contributions in Neotropical Palaeontology , London, Palaeontological Association, Wiley-Blackwell 2004
  • Editor with M. Ruta, AC Milner Patterns and processes in early vertebrate evolution , Special Papers in Palaeontology 81, 2009, 1–173.
  • with Henning Blom, Per Erik Ahlberg Localities, Distribution and Stratigraphical Context of the Late Devonian Tetrapods of East Greenland (Meddelelser om Grønland) , Danish Polar Center 2005
  • Getting a leg up on land , Scientific American, November 2005
  • The fish - tetrapod transition: new fossils and interpretations , Evolution: Education and Outreach, 2, 2009, 213-223
  • The emergence of early tetrapods , Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 232, 2006, 167-189
  • The fin to limb transition: new data, interpretations, and hypotheses from paleontology and developmental biology , Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, 37, 2009, 163-179
  • with TR Smithson, SP Wood, JEA Marshall Earliest Carboniferous tetrapod and arthropod faunas from Scotland populate Romer's Gap , Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 109, 2009, 4532-4537

literature

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Jenny Clack - Biography. Retrieved November 24, 2018 .
  2. ↑ When she approached Panchen about a dissertation topic, he asked her to obtain the specimen of the fossil from a museum in Bradford for research purposes, which she succeeded.
  3. ↑ However, it turned out that several fossils collected by geologist Peter Friend in Greenland in the 1960s and 1970s, which he believed to be Ichthyostega and which were in the Sedgwick Museum in Cambridge, could be assigned to Acanthostega .
  4. ↑ The fossil was inaccessible to research for decades because Jarvik had not given access to other researchers for 50 years (he died in 1998).
  5. ↑ Professor Jenny Clack. 1st episode from the 2nd season of the series Beautiful Minds . BBC4, April 11, 2012, accessed November 24, 2018 .
  6. ↑ https://www.facebook.com/TWeedProject/posts/3077206302336260
personal data
SURNAME Clack, Jennifer
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Clack, Jennifer A .; Clack, Jennifer Alice (full name); Clack, Jenny
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH November 3, 1947
DATE OF DEATH March 26, 2020