William A. Clemens

William Alvin Clemens Jr. (born May 15, 1932 near Berkeley , California ) is an American vertebrate paleontologist who has been a leading expert on the early development of mammals in the Mesozoic Era since the 1950s .

Clemens studied at the University of California, Berkeley , where he received his master's degree in 1954 and his doctorate in paleontology in 1960. From 1961 he was at the University of Kansas , where he made it to associate professor and associate curator for fossils of higher vertebrate animals in the associated natural history museum. In 1967 he became an Associate Professor and in 1971 Professor of Paleontology at Berkeley University. In 1982 he was Miller Institute Research Professor at Berkeley. From 1994 he was in the Faculty of Integrated Biology . From 1987 to 1989 he was director of the Museum of Paleontology there . In 2002 he retired.

He dealt with the evolution of primitive mammals in the Mesozoic and the Cretaceous-Tertiary border, where he was a leading proponent of a gradual decline of the dinosaurs even before the meteorite impact and pointed to a slight impairment of the mammals by the event. This led to controversial debates with the supporters of the meteorite catastrophe thesis around Walter Alvarez (who was on the same faculty in Berkeley) until the 1990s. He published monographs on early European mammals and the mammals of the Cretaceous Lance Formation in Wyoming . He also studied the microstructure of teeth in early mammals (the types of fossils found mainly from these).

In 1974 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and in 1978/79 Alexander von Humboldt US Senior Scientist Fellow, doing research in Munich (and later on another sabbatical in Bonn in the early 1990s ). He received the Penrose Award from the Geological Society of America , of which he is a member. In 2006 he received the Romer Simpson Medal of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology , of which he was president from 1992 to 1994 and of which he became an honorary member in 2002. In the same year he received their JT Gregory Award. He is a fellow of the California Academy of Sciences , of which he was a trustee from 1988 to 1997, as well as vice president and four years president. In 1991 he became a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science .

He has been married to Dorothy Clemens since 1955 and has three daughters and one son.

Fonts

• Editor with Jason A. Lillegraven, Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska Mesozoic Mammals- the first two thirds of mammalian history , University of California Press 1979
• Ecological diversification of mammals during the Mesozoic, the Age of Dinosaurs . McGraw-Hill 2006
• Fossil mammals of the type Lance formation, Wyoming , University of California Press, 3 volumes, from 1964
• Rhaeto-Liassic mammals from Switzerland and West Germany , Bavarian State Collection Munich 1980
• "Characterization of enamel microstructure and application of the origins of prismatic structures in systematic analyzes", in Wighart von Koenigswald (ed.) Tooth enamel microstructure . Rotterdam: AA Balkema 1997, pp. 85-112.
• "Patterns of mammalian evolution across the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary". Messages from the Museum of Natural History in Berlin, Zoological Series, Volume 77, 2001, pp. 175–191.
• "Evolution of the mammalian fauna across the Cretaceous-Tertiary boundary in northeastern Montana and other areas of the Western Interior." Geological Society of America, Special Paper 361, 2002, pp. 217-245.

Web links

• Honored on the occasion of the Romer-Simpson-Medal
• Appreciation in Berkeley
• Curriculum vitae at the University of California, Berkeley

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Life data according to American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2004
2. ^ William Glen (ed.) Mass extinction debates-how science works in a crisis , Stanford University Press 1994