Terry Harrison

Terry Harrison (born October 24, 1955 in Enfield , Middlesex , England ) is a British paleoanthropologist and has been a professor at New York University since 1984 .

research

Terry Harrison studied from 1975 at University College London , where he obtained a bachelor's degree in anthropology in 1978 and a doctorate in 1982 with a study on "Small-bodied apes from the Miocene of East Africa". Also in 1982 he acquired the ability to exercise the Magisterium , and he 1982-1984 as biology -teacher at the Latymer School in Lower Edmonton, a northern outskirts of Greater London taught.

In 1984 Harrison was appointed research assistant to the Department of Anthropology at New York University. In 1990 he got a position as associate professor ; since 1995 he has been a full professor . Since 2003 he has also been director of the Center for the Study of Human Origins at New York University.

Terry Harrison is a specialist in the morphology and paleoecology of Miocene and Pliocene primates . Since 1998 he has been leading excavations in the area of Laetoli , Tanzania , where - for the first time at this site - he also discovered fossil bones from the body region below the head of prehistoric humans - the species Australopithecus afarensis . He also hid the first fossils of Paranthropus aethiopicus discovered in Tanzania . Harrison is also researching, among other things, the remains of Proconsul and - in collaboration with Chinese colleagues - the fossils of Lufengpithecus , a distant relative of the orangutans around 3 million years old . With Peter Andrews he wrote the first description of Proconsul meswae .

Honors

The type species of the genus Lomorupithecus , Lomorupithecus harrisoni , was named after him.

Fonts (selection)

• as editor: Neogene Paleontology of the Manonga Valley, Tanzania: A Window into East African Evolutionary History. Plenum Press, New York 1997, ISBN 978-0306454714 .
• as co-author: On the systematic status of the late Neogene hominoids from Yunnan Province, China. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 43, 2002, pp. 207-227. doi : 10.1006 / jhev.2002.0570
• as ed. with Katerina Harvati : Neanderthals Revisited: New Approaches and Perspectives. Springer, Dordrecht 2006, ISBN 978-1402051203 .
• with Peter Andrews : The anatomy and systematic position of the early Miocene proconsulid from Meswa Bridge, Kenya. In: Journal of Human Evolution. Volume 56, No. 5, 2009, pp. 479-496. doi: 10.1016 / j.jhevol.2009.02.005
• Apes Among the Tangled Branches of Human Origins. In: Science . Volume 327, 2010, pp. 532–534, doi : 10.1126 / science.1184703 , full text (PDF; 425 kB) ( Memento from February 23, 2014 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

• Terry Harrison's website with a link to the curriculum vitae
• Center for the Study of Human Origins website