Richard Swann Lull
Richard Swann Lull , quoted as RS Lull, (born November 6, 1867 in Annapolis - † April 22, 1957 ) was an American vertebrate paleontologist.
Lull was the son of a naval officer, his mother Elizabeth Burton was the daughter of General Henry Stanton Burton . Lull was short-sighted and therefore could not pursue the military career of his ancestors. He studied zoology at Rutgers College with a master's degree in 1896. In 1918 he received an honorary doctorate there. Lull worked briefly as an entomologist for the US Department of Agriculture and in 1894 became Assistant Professor and later Associate Professor of Zoology at the State Agricultural College in Amherst, Massachusetts . There was a collection of fossil dinosaur tracks from the Connecticut River Valley's Red Bed , which brought it to paleontology.
In 1899 he was involved in the excavation of the American Museum of Natural History in the Jurassic Bone Cabin Quarry in Wyoming (north of Laramie ) (under the direction of Henry Fairfield Osborn ), which was discovered in 1897 by Walter W. Granger and where many of the museum's skeletons ( such as a Brontosaurus , Stegosaurus and Allosaurus ) have been found. It was excavated there from 1898 to 1905. From 1902 he was involved in excavations for the museum in Montana.
In 1903 he received his doctorate at Columbia University under Osborn, was then again in Amherst and from 1906 Assistant Professor of Vertebrate Paleontology at Yale University and Associate Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the museum's Peabody Museum of Natural History . From 1922 until his retirement in 1936 he was director there. During his time the museum moved with the assembly of some of the large dinosaur skeletons from the collection of Othniel Charles Marsh (whom Lull never met himself since he died in 1894) in the Great Hall . Lull was a popular teacher at Yale. He hardly took part in excavations at Yale; according to him, the best excavations could be made in the Peabody's magazines.
In 1917 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1933 he received the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences . In 1951 he became an honorary member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology .
Like other palaeontologists at the time, he was a supporter of an evolutionary theory that was alternative to Darwin's theory, which also postulated sudden leaps in speciation ( orthogenesis ). As an example he named the antlers of the giant deer Megaloceros giganteus ( Irish Elk ).
He coined the generic names Anchisauripus (1904, a trace taxon of the theropods ), Diceratops (1905, together with John Hatcher ; today replaced by Nedoceratops ), Proceratops (1906, as a replacement name for Ceratops ; both today Nomina dubia ) and Anatosaurus (together with Nelda E. . Wright, 1942; now a synonym of Edmontosaurus ).
George Gaylord Simpson is one of his students .
Fonts
- Organic Evolution , MacMillan 1917, 1939
- Ancient Man , Doubleday 1928
- with John Bell Hatcher Ceratopsia ( based on preliminary studies of Othniel C. Marsh ), Washington DC, United States Government Printing Office 1907
- A revision of Ceratopsia , New Haven 1933
- Fossils; what they tell us of plants and animals of the past , New York 1932
- Triassic life of the Connecticut valley , Hartford 1915 (State Geological and Natural History Survey of Connecticut, Bulletin 24)
- The ways of life, New York, London , Harper Brothers 1925
Web links
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Lull, Richard Swann |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American vertebrate paleontologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 6, 1867 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Annapolis |
| DATE OF DEATH | 1957 |