Mark McMenamin

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Mark Allan McMenamin (born February 4, 1958 in Portland (Oregon) ) is an American geologist and paleontologist . He teaches at Mount Holyoke College . The main focus of his professional activity is in the field of paleontology , and his main research area is the Ediacaran fauna . He also dealt with archeology. His research methods, both extensive and unusual, have at times been criticized, but in several cases, in the light of new evidence, his critics have been forced to admit the validity of his approaches.

Life

McMenamin graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor's degree in 1979 and received a PhD in geology from the University of California, Santa Barbara , in 1984 . From 1979 to 1984 he was a laboratory scientist for organic biochemistry at the US Geological Survey . In 1984 he became a professor of geology at Mount Holyoke College.

He has been married to Dianna Schulte McMenamin since 1981, with whom he also published and with whom he has three daughters.

From 1988 to 1993 he received the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the National Science Foundation. He is a Fellow of the Geological Society of London and the Paleontological Society .

Contributions to geology and paleontology

He deals with the early evolution of the biosphere (formation of animals in the transition from Precambrian to Cambrian and Cambrian explosion , settlement of the country), and Proterozoic supercontinents. With his wife Dianna McMenamin, he introduced the concept of the Proterozoic supercontinent Rodinia .

In 1995 he discovered 585 million year old fossils from the Clemente Formation in the Sonora in Mexico, which he assigned to the Ediacara fauna . According to McMenamin, these included the oldest arthropod traces, the oldest trace fossils of complex animals and the oldest fossil evidence of prey capture, but this was not generally recognized. Previously, he found shellfish fossils from the early Cambrian ( Sinotubulites cienegensis ) in Sonora and in 1992 he found two species from the brachiopod tribe Mickwitzia .

With Dianna McMenarmin he propagated the concept of Hypersee (Hypersea) to describe the success of the first colonization of the country and the species-rich biomass of land creatures, by which their internal body fluids are meant (a new habitat for the co-development initially of plants, fungi and Protozoa with a parasitic or symbiotic way of life) and which, according to McMenamin, first manifested in the deposits of the Rhynie Chert in the Devonian. He has a similar position as Lynn Margulis in emphasizing the role of symbiosis in evolution and in criticizing neo-Darwinism .

The McMenarmins attribute the storage of ichthyosaur fossils in the Berlin-Ichthyosaur State Park to the capture by Triassic octopuses.

In 2012, he suggested that the honeycomb-reticulated trace fossil Paleodictyon, known since 1850, is the nest of an unknown animal, which would be the earliest indication of brood care in the animal kingdom.

Phoenician research and diffusionism

In addition to his professional research, McMenamin is also interested in a. the history of the Carthaginians , with one of his focuses in the field of numismatics . So he got because of his studies of figures on previously unknown Carthaginian gold coins for Hannibal's occupation forces in Calabria were minted, that the long-controversial route of the commander and his army at their legendary crossing of the view Alps them near the Matterhorn have passed . This route is to the north of most of the commonly suggested approaches and this could explain the total surprise of the Italians when the Carthaginian army suddenly appeared on the plains of Italy .

Far more explosive, as far as the conventional understanding of Mediterranean antiquity is concerned, appear other numismatic clues, which were presented by McMenamin as early as 1996/97. They could support the diffusionist assumption , which has been controversial for decades, that Carthaginian seafarers are present in North America . It was u. a. around several old Carthaginian gold coins - probably around 350 BC. - on which miniaturized world maps are to be seen, which, in addition to India, not only show the southern coasts of Europe above Sardinia and Sicily , but also America.

He also points to more than half a dozen copper coin finds that have been found in North America, scattered across Nebraska , Georgia and Connecticut . According to McMenamin, these coins feature the image of a Punic horse, a Phoenician palm (with exposed roots as if about to be transplanted) and an enigmatic inscription in Punic. It seems unlikely that these coins - provided they were authentic - got there recently across the Atlantic, so that they actually suggest a Carthaginian presence in ancient America. Together with the fact that finds of Carthaginian coins made of gold and base metals were reported in the Azores as early as 1778 , this evidence suggested that the Carthaginians were able to cross the Atlantic in a targeted manner.

bibliography

  • Mark AS McMenamin: The Garden of Ediacara: Discovering the Earliest Complex Life , New Ed. Edition, Columbia University Press, Oct 2000, ISBN 0-231-10559-2 .
  • Mark AS McMenamin, McMenamin, Dianna Schulte .: The Emergence of Animals: The Cambrian Breakthrough . Columbia University Press, Jan 1990, ISBN 0-231-06646-5 .
  • Mark AS McMenamin, McMenamin, Dianna Schulte: Hypersea: Life on the Land . Columbia University Press, 1994, ISBN 0-231-07530-8 .
  • Mark AS McMenamin: Carthaginian Cartography: A Stylized Exergue Map . Meanma Press, 1996, ISBN 0-9651136-1-2 .
  • Mark AS McMenamin: Science 101: Geology  (= Science 101). Collins, Jun 2007, ISBN 0-06-089136-X .
  • Mark AS McMenamin: Paleotorus: The Laws of Morphogenetic Evolution . Meanma Press, 2009, ISBN 978-1-893882-18-8 .
  • Mark AS McMenamin: Cambrian cannibals: Agnostid trilobite ethology and the earliest known case of arthropod cannibalism . In: Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs . 42, No. 5, 2010, p. 320.
  • Mark McMenamin: Paleotorus: the laws of morphogenetic evolution , Meanma Press 2009

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science, Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ Steve Macone, "Out There," in: Boston Globe Magazine (The Boston Globe), June 3, 2007, p. 27
  3. ↑ McMenamin, Ediacaran biota from Sonora, Mexico, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, Volume 93, 1996, pp. 4990-4993
  4. ^ McMenamin, Basal Cambrian small shelly fossils from the La Ciénega Formation, northwestern Sonora, Mexico, Journal of Paleontology, Volume 59, 1985, pp. 1414-1425
  5. ^ McMenamin, Two new species of the Cambrian genus Mickwitzia, Journal of Paleontology, Volume 66, 1992, pp. 173-182
  6. ↑ McMenamin, McMenamin, Hypersea and the land ecosystem, BioSystems, Volume 31, 1993, pp. 145-153.
  7. ↑ McMenamin, McMenamin, Hypersea: Life on the Land, Columbia University Press 1994
  8. ↑ McMenarmin, McMenarmin: Triassic Kraken: The Berlin Ichthyosaur Death Assemblage Interpreted as a Giant Cephalopod Midden, Geological Society of America Abstracts with Programs, Volume 43, 2011, p. 310
  9. ↑ Colin Barras, Leonardo fossil sketch may depict early nests, Nature, November 16, 2012
  10. ↑ Mark McMenamin, "Depiction of the Alps on Punic coins from Campania, Italy", in: Numismatics International Bulletin 41 (1-2), 2012, pp 30-33
  11. ^ Mark McMenamin, "The Phoenician world map", in: Mercator's World 2 (3), 1997, pp. 46-51
  12. ^ Mark McMenamin, Phoenician coins and Phoenician exploration (abstract) ; as well as full text (PDF file, 893.56 kB), at Migration & Diffusion (accessed: June 9, 2013)
personal data
SURNAME McMenamin, Mark
ALTERNATIVE NAMES McMenamin, Mark Allan
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American geologist and paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH 4th February 1958
PLACE OF BIRTH Portland, Oregon