Michael J. Novacek

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Michael John Novacek (born June 3, 1948 in Evanston (Illinois) ) is an American vertebrate paleontologist who studies the evolution of mammals. He is a curator at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH).

Life

Novacek studied at the University of California, Los Angeles , with a bachelor's degree in 1971, at San Diego State University with a master's degree in 1973, where he was lecturer in zoology in 1976/77 and assistant professor from 1977 to 1979, and he received her PhD in paleontology from the University of California, Berkeley in 1977 ( Evolution and Relationships of the Leptictidae (Eutheria: Mammalia) ). From 1977 he was a researcher at the Museum of Paleontology at the University of California at Berkeley. He is Curator, Senior Vice President and Provost for Science at the AMNH, where he has been since 1979 (first as Research Fellow of the National Science Foundation and from 1981 as Assistant Curator). From 1985 to 1989 he was head of the paleontology department at the AMNH.

He leads research at the AMNH, which under his leadership received the right to conduct doctorates in 2006.

He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science . He has two honorary doctorates from Long Island University , Beloit College . In 2005 he received the Lowell Thomas Award from the Explorer Club.

plant

In addition to fossil mammals (from the Mesozoic to the Tertiary), he deals with the recent extinction of many animal species, the connection between molecular genetic data and morphological systematics, the functional morphology of the auditory system in bats and other mammals, and has published on the connection between the increasing oxygen content in geological history with the evolution of mammals.

He undertook expeditions to Fossil Find alongside the United States, among others in the Andean region of Chile, Argentina, Mexico (Baja California), Africa, Yemen, the Rocky Mountain Region and Mongolia, where he co-organizer of some of the expeditions of the AMNH in the Gobi Desert from In 1990 he was and is one of the co-discoverers of the rich Ukhaa Tolgod fossil site (1993).

He is one of the first to describe Ukhaatherium from Mongolia.

Fonts

  • Time Traveler: in search of dinosaurs and ancient mammals from Montana to Mongolia , Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2002
  • Dinosaurs of the Flaming Cliffs , Anchor Books / Doubleday 1996
  • Our 100-Million-Year-Old Ecosystems and the Threats That Now Put It at Risk , Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007
  • Editor with Frederick S. Szalay, Malcolm C. McKenna: Mammal Phylogeny , Springer Verlag 1993
  • Editor with Quentin D. Wheeler: Extinction and Phylogeny , Columbia University Press 1992
  • Editor: The biodiversity crisis: losing what counts , New Press / Norton 2001
  • 100 Million Years of Land Vertebrate Evolution: The Cretaceous-Early Tertiary Transition , Ann. Missouri Botanical Garden, 86 (1999): 230-258
  • Paleontological Data and the Study of Adaptation , in MR Rose, GV Lauder Adaptation , Academic Press 1996, pp. 311-359
  • with MA O'Leary, M. Allard, J. Meng, J. Gatesy: Building the mammalian sector of the Tree of Life: combing different data and a discussion of divergence times for placental mammals , in J. Cracraft, MJ Donoghue (ed ): Assembling the Tree of Life , Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 490-516
  • with Mark Norell, MC McKenna, JM Clark: Fossils of the Flaming Cliffs , Scientific American 271, 1994, No. 6, pp. 60-69.
  • Mammalian phylogeny: shaking the tree , Nature 356, 1992, pp. 121-125
  • Mammalian phylogeny: Genes and supertrees , Current Biology, Volume 11, 2001, R573-R575

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
  2. ↑ M. J Novacek, E. Cleland. The Current Biodiversity Extinction Event: Scenarios for Mitigation and Recovery. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 98 (2001): 5466-5470
  3. ^ RJ Asher, MJ, Novacek, JH Geisler Relationships of endemic African mammals and their fossil relatives based on morphological and molecular evidence , Journal of Mammalian Evolution, 10, 2003, 131-194
  4. ↑ Falkowski, PG, Katz, ME, Milligan, AJ, Fennel, K., Cramer, BS, Aubry, MP, Berner, RA, Novacek, MJ, Zapol, WM The rise of oxygen over the past 205 million years and the evolution of large placental mammals , Science, 309, 2005, pp. 2202-2204
  5. ↑ Dashzeveg, D., MJ Novacek, MA Norell , JM Clark , LM Chiappe , A. Davidson, MC McKenna , L. Dingus , C. Swisher, P. Altangerel Extraordinary Preservation in a New Vertebrate Assemblage from the Late Cretaceous of Mongolia , Nature 374: 446-449 (1995)
personal data
SURNAME Novacek, Michael J.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Novacek, Michael John
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH June 3, 1948
PLACE OF BIRTH Evanston (Illinois)