Thomas H. Rich

Thomas Hewitt Rich , also Tom Rich, (born May 30, 1941 in Evanston , Illinois ) is an Australian vertebrate paleontologist.

Rich is originally from the United States, grew up in Southern California and Texas, studied at the University of California, Berkeley (with Ruben Arthur Stirton), with a bachelor's degree in 1964 and a master's degree in 1967, and received his doctorate in 1973 from Columbia University on fossil hedgehogs in the northern hemisphere . During his studies he was a computer programmer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory from 1964 to 1967 . From 1971 to 1973 he was a laboratory technician at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City . He and his wife Patricia Vickers-Rich (now a professor at Monash University ) came to Australia in the early 1970s, where his wife was a post-doctoral student looking for bird fossils. He is Senior Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at the Melbourne Museum (formerly known as the Museum of Victoria) in Melbourne , where he has been since 1974.

He is particularly concerned with early mammals, especially the Cretaceous Period in the ancient Gondwana continents of the southern hemisphere (for which he first looked in Australia for two decades in vain). He and his wife Patricia Vickers-Rich were instrumental in the discovery of a rich mammal and dinosaur fauna in the 1980s and 1990s that existed when Australia and Antarctica were in polar regions (in the early Cretaceous about 110 million years ago ). The climate was more moderate than today, but there were still long periods of darkness and frost (as for example cryoturbation in the layers shows). The first dinosaur finds were made (on the particularly rich coast of Victoria (Australia) ) in Australia in 1903 by the geologist William Hamilton Ferguson . The Rich couple dug for decades (from 1984) in the coastal cliffs of Victoria, especially in Dinosaur Cove near Great Otway National Park on the southern tip of Australia (near Inverloch ), where the Otway Ranges border the coast ( Flat Rocks ). To do this, they dug and blasted tunnels in the coastal cliffs with the assistance of amateur paleontologists as volunteers.

Mostly Hypsilophodontidae were found, but traces of theropods were also found (such as a footprint in 2007). In 2009, one of the fossils they found was also identified as that of the Tyrannosaurus, the first evidence of the same in the southern hemisphere.

In addition to Australia, he also excavated in Alaska and Patagonia.

Both named Serendipaceratops (2003), Leaellynasaura (1989, a hypsilophodont) and Timimus (1993) (both after their children Leaellyn and Tim), Atlascopcosaurus (1989), Quantassaurus (1999), named after the Australian airline Qantas . Rich found a skull from Leaellynasaura, which, with a particularly large visual area, indicated that the animals were adjusting to the partial darkness in the polar region. In the case of larger species, seasonal migration is assumed in the polar winter. With Fernando Novas, the couple also first described Tyrannotitan from Argentina.

He also named the oldest mammal in Australia, Ausktribophenos nyktos, who lived 115 million years ago at the time of the dinosaurs, discovered in 1997 near Melbourne. It wasn't a marsupial.

In 2010 he and his wife received the Committee for Research and Exploration Chairman's Award from the National Geographic Society .

Rich is an Australian citizen. He has been married since 1966 and has children Timothy and Leaellyn.

Fonts

• with Patricia Vickers-Rich A century of Australian Dinosaurs , Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery, Launceston, Tasmania, 2003
• Polar dinosaurs of Australia , Victoria Nature Series Museum, 2007
• with Patricia Vickers-Rich, Peter Trusler The Artist and the Scientists: Bringing Prehistory to Life , Cambridge University Press 2010
• with Patricia Vickers-Rich Dinosaurs of Darkness , Indiana University Press 2000
• with Patricia Vickers-Rich Wildlife of Gondwana , Indiana University Press 1991
• Deltatheridia, Carnivora, and Condylarthra (Mammalia) of the early Eocene, Paris Basin, France , University of California Publications in the Geological Sciences, Volume 88, 1971
• with Donald L. Rasmussen New North American erinaceine hedgehogs (Mammalia: Insectivora) , Museum of Natural History, University of Kansas, Lawrence 1973
• Origin and history of the Erinaceinae and Brachyericinae (Mammalia, Insectivora) in North America , American Museum of Natural History 1981
• with Patricia Vickers-Rich Dinosaurs of the Antarctic , Scientific American Special Edition: Dinosaurs and other monsters , 2004, pp. 40-47

Web links

• Site at the Victoria Museum
• Mitch Leslie The strange life of polar Dinosaurs , Smithsonian Magazine, December 2007

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
2. ↑ Announcement of the Museum Victoria, 2010 ( Memento of the original from 23 August 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.