Robert M. Chandler

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Robert Malcolm Chandler is an American vertebrate paleontologist and ornithologist who specializes in fossil birds and their biogeography. He is a professor of biology at Georgia College & State University .

Chandler earned his bachelor's degree in zoology from Southern Illinois University in 1976 and his master's degree from San Diego State University in 1985 . In 1990 he received his PhD from the University of Kansas (in systematics and ecology) . His dissertation topic was Phylogenetic analysis of the alcids .

Chandler is best known for researching the terror birds in North America, which immigrated there 2.5 million years ago, in the Great American Fauna Exchange . In particular, he found Titanis walleri fossils in Florida (in the bed of the Santa Fe River, in north central Florida) that were recovered with diving expeditions. Chandler found, among other things, a humerus and suggested, contrary to the other reconstruction of terror birds with receding wings, that they possibly had a large claw there that was used to catch prey. He deals in general with the systematics and phylogenesis of terror birds. He appeared in documentaries about terror birds on National Geographic and Discovery Channel.

He also conducted fieldwork on fossil birds in the Midwest (Nebraska, Kansas), Georgia, South Carolina, Idaho, Louisiana, Colorado (Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument), Bolivia, and Trinidad.

In 2012 he described a 1899 unearthed in Patagonia (and the American Museum of Natural History befindliches) tinamous bird from the Miocene , Crypturellus REAI .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Santa Fe River Project, The Dive Log, October 1993.
  2. ^ Chandler The wing of Titanis walleri (Aves: Phorusrhacidae) from the late Blancan of Florida . Bulletin Florida Museum Natural History, Biological Sciences Series, 36, 1994, 175-180, online .
  3. ↑ This has been contradicted by others. Gina C. Gould, Irvy Quitmyer Titanis walleri: Bones of contention , Bulletin florida Museum Natural History, 45, 2005, 201-229, pdf .
  4. ↑ Chandler A New Species of Tinamou (Aves: Tinamiformes, Tinamidae) from the Early-Middle Miocene of Argentina , Journal of Vertebrate Palaeontology 9, 2012, 1-8.
personal data
SURNAME Chandler, Robert M.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Chandler, Robert Malcolm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American ornithologist and paleontologist
DATE OF BIRTH 20th century