Posted on 04/23/2005 6:32:14 PM PDT by Borges
Dr. Norman D. Newell, an influential paleontologist who challenged opponents of evolutionary theory and helped shape theories explaining the mass extinctions of species, died on Monday at his home in Leonia, N.J., his family said. He was 96.
In a wide-ranging career that included scholarship, fieldwork and popular writing, he taught at Columbia and spent four decades as a curator of invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan.
Dr. Newell pursued his interests in the evolution of living and fossil bivalve mollusks, the formation and ecology of coral reefs and the geological history of the Peruvian Andes. His work on mass extinctions began in the 1950's, when he began to look at the disappearance of certain clams and other mollusks from the fossil record in Texas.
He compared clams to other marine invertebrates in the Upper Paleozoic and Early Mesozoic periods - about 245 million years ago - and eventually concluded that the extinctions were a result of changes in sea levels and a fatal retreat of warm and shallow seas. Although other scientists had been aware of the marine extinctions, Dr. Newell was an early and dedicated investigator of their causes and the conditions surrounding them.
Dr. Niles Eldredge, a curator in the division of paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan, and Dr. Stephen Jay Gould, the essayist and Harvard paleontologist who died in 2002, were students of Dr. Newell's at Columbia. In the 1970's, they developed the theory of punctuated equilibrium in evolution, which is the notion that transitions in species take place periodically, during intense periods of activity and not necessarily as part of a steady and gradual process.
Dr. Eldredge said yesterday that Dr. Newell became "a voice crying in the wilderness" in explaining the evolutionary importance of mass extinctions "at a time when no one else in the field was talking about them."
"Now, increasingly in evolutionary thinking," he added, "we recognize that extinction triggers what happens with the history of life, and is part and parcel with the evolution of life." In 1947, Dr. Newell led an expedition to the Peruvian Andes, near a region that he had previously helped to map, to collect marine fossils from elevations above 10,000 feet.
In 1952, he led a group of scientists from the Museum of Natural History to study South Pacific atolls that were formed by coral reefs. The group landed on the atoll of Raroia, where Dr. Newell examined the ecology and sedimentation of reef systems.
In later studies of coral reefs in the Bahamas in the 1960's, Dr. Newell brought "the study of fossils into the realm of ecology and managed to reconstruct what they were like in living communities," Dr. John Imbrie, emeritus professor of paleo-oceanography at Brown University, said yesterday.
Later in his career, Dr. Newell contributed to the public debate pitting theories of creationism against evolution. His 1982 book "Creation and Evolution: Myth or Reality?" was intended for a popular audience and became "a ringing defense of Darwinian evolution that makes it very clear that nobody in science disagrees that man has evolved," Dr. Eldredge said.
Dr. Newell continued to study extinction and proposed that the earth in the late 20th century was experiencing "one of the greatest of all mass extinctions." He attributed the losses of hundreds of species to ecological disturbances caused by humans. Indeed, a 1987 paper written by Dr. Newell and a museum colleague, Dr. Leslie Marcus, found a nearly direct correlation between an increase in world population and increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
The paper was published in Palaios, a journal of the Society of Economic Paleontologists and Mineralogists, and found that emissions of carbon dioxide were "almost wholly dependent on human activities with only very minor contributions from natural causes."
Norman Dennis Newell was born in Chicago. He received his bachelor's and master's degrees from the University of Kansas and a doctorate in geology from Yale.
He taught at the University of Wisconsin before 1945, when he joined the Museum of Natural History, where he remained for the rest of his career. He was named a curator emeritus in 1977.
Dr. Newell was president of the Society for the Study of Evolution in 1949. He was elected president of the Paleontological Society in 1960 and 1961. In 1978 he was awarded the American Museum of Natural History's Gold Medal for Achievement in Science.
He is survived by his wife, the former Gillian Wormall.
RIP ping!
Methinks he may have just discovered a missing link in his worldview.
Does that mean he studied himself???
He is now, I'll bet.
If we could only figure out what causes Liberals to become extinct.
Later in his career, Dr. Newell contributed to the public debate pitting theories of creationism against evolution. His 1982 book "Creation and Evolution: Myth or Reality?" was intended for a popular audience and became "a ringing defense of Darwinian evolution that makes it very clear that nobody in science disagrees that man has evolved," Dr. Eldredge said.
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That headline/title needs to be put to rest!
Are they going fossilize him or bury him in the La Brea Tar pits?
Thanks for the ping! I join in prayer for his loved ones!
And, yes, her legs truly were that fantastic...
Don't know what the critters are, kind of a cross between a clam and an oyster, from the looks of them. I looked it up once, but don't remember what they are. They are in west Texas in huge quantities. One of those "used to be a critter in a dried up thing called the 'Permian Sea' kind of things".
I can see why their existence in a dried up wasteland would cause someone to ask questions.
Take away their welfare.
I've seen hotter threads ...
My father was one of Dr. Newell's first grad students at the University of Wisconsin.
He will be missed.
So9
Sorry I can't help but cut loose a couple of guffaws. How ironic!
Instead of a traditional burial, shouldn't he be dropped into some quicksetting mud and covered up?
That he wasn't imortal?
I'll remember to crack rude the next time someone you knew and respected dies.
So9
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