Malcolm McKenna

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Malcolm Carnegie McKenna (born July 21, 1930 in Pomona , California , † March 3, 2008 in Boulder , Colorado ) was an American vertebrate paleontologist. He was a specialist in fossil mammals.

McKenna studied at Pomona College and Caltech and at the University of California, Berkeley , where he received his bachelor's degree in 1954 and his doctorate in paleontology in 1958. From 1960 he was initially assistant curator and from 1968 curator (Frick Curator) for vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History (with which professorships were also connected). He was also a professor at Columbia University since 1972 . In 2000 he retired. In 2001 McKenna became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . He was a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences .

He was a leading specialist in the systematics of mammals, about which he wrote a standard work with Susan Bell. At the American Museum of Natural History, he was largely responsible for the first expeditions to the Gobi Desert , the first since Roy Chapman Andrews in the 1920s. McKenna took part in this in search of mammalian fossils from the Mesozoic Era. In his last years he investigated the question of how mammals survived the mass extinction caused by asteroid impact at the turn of the Cretaceous-Tertiary.

In 2001 he received the Romer-Simpson Medal of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology and in 1992 the Paleontological Society Medal .

He had been married to Priscilla McKenna since 1953 and had three sons and a daughter. His wife accompanied him on various expeditions and was mayor of Englewood , New Jersey, where she lives . His father was a co-founder of Claremont McKenna College in California and the family was related to steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie . His brother Bruce McKenna is a screenwriter.

Fonts

  • with Susan K. Bell Classification of Mammals above the species level , Columbia University Press 1997

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Birth and career dates from American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004. Death dates from obituary in the New York Times, March 10, 2008
  2. ^ Book of Members. Retrieved July 26, 2016 .
  3. ↑ Malcolm J. Novacek, Mark Norell, Malcolm C. McKenna, James Clark: Fossils of the Flaming Cliffs. In: Scientific American. Volume 271, December 1994
personal data
SURNAME McKenna, Malcolm
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McKenna, Malcolm Carnegie (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH July 21, 1930
PLACE OF BIRTH Pomona , California
DATE OF DEATH March 3, 2008
Place of death Boulder , Colorado