Michel Brunet (paleoanthropologist)

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Michel Brunet (2008)
Michel Brunet and his assistant with the skull of Sahelanthropus tchadensis from the Miocene

Michel Brunet (born April 6, 1940 in Vienne , Isère , France ) is a French paleontologist and paleoanthropologist . He became internationally known primarily because of his function as excavation director of the Mission Paléoanthropologique Franco-Tchadienne in northern Chad , where his team discovered the holotype of the new species Australopithecus bahrelghazali in 1995 at the site KT 12 and in 2001 - also in northern Chad, in the Reference TM 266 - the holotype ofSahelanthropus tchadensis .

Life

Michel Brunet grew up on a farm in Poitou in southwest France . During the Second World War he lived with his grandmother in a village near Poitiers . Only at the age of 8 did he come back to his parents, who were meanwhile living in Versailles . In 1958 he obtained the Baccalauréat at the Lycée Hoche in Versailles and then studied natural sciences and paleontology at the Sorbonne in Paris , where he completed his studies in 1966 with a doctoral thesis in paleontology. He then moved to the University of Poitiers , where he worked with mammal - fossils from the Paleogene ; In 1975 he obtained a second doctorate here. He has been a professor at the University of Poitiers since 1989 and at the Collège de France since 2007 .

From 1976 he studied with David Pilbeam apes -Fossilien the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan and in Iraq. Due to the uncertain political situation in these countries, he later turned to African sites, first in Cameroon in 1984 and from 1994 in Chad . In 1995 , the Mission Paléoanthropologique Franco-Tchadienne , a collaboration between the University of Poitiers, the University of N'Djamena and the Center National d'Appui à la Recherche (CNAR, N'Djamena ), discovered a fossil lower jaw in the Chad Basin ; this was reported as the first specimen of the species Australopithecus bahrelghazali in the following year . Seven years later, his team published the discovery of the new genus and species Sahelanthropus tchadensis . He carried out further field studies in Nigeria , Togo , South Africa , Libya and Egypt, among others .

Awards

Michel Brunet is among other things Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor , Officier des Ordre national du Mérite , Ordre des Palmes Académiques and Ordre National du Tchad .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Michel Brunet et al .: Australopithecus bahrelghazali, une nouvelle espèce d'Hominidé ancien de la région de Koro Toro (Tchad). In: Comptes Rendus de l'Academie de Sciences - Series IIa: Sciences de la Terre et des Planetes. Volume 322, No. 10, 1996, pp. 907–913 short version ( Memento from September 7, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ^ Michel Brunet et al .: A new hominid from the Upper Miocene of Chad, Central Africa. In: Nature . Volume 418, 2002, pp. 145-151, doi: 10.1038 / nature00879
  3. ^ Ann Gibbons: Profile: Michel Brunet. One Scientist's Quest for the Origin of Our Species. In: Science . Volume 298, No. 5599, 2002, pp. 1708-1711, doi: 10.1126 / science.298.5599.1708
personal data
SURNAME Brunet, Michel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French paleoanthropologist, co-discoverer of Australopithecus bahrelghazali and Sahelanthropus tchadensis
DATE OF BIRTH April 6, 1940
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienne