Luis M. Chiappe

Luis M. Chiappe ( born June 18, 1962) is an Argentine paleontologist.

Chiappe worked in the 1990s at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He is curator and director of the Dinosaur Institute of the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles. He is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern California.

Chiappe is primarily concerned with archosaurs and the evolution of birds ( Paläornithologie ) and had to field work alongside the United States, among others, in Mongolia, Argentina, China and Kazakhstan.

He focused in particular on the early evolution of birds, but also with later periods. He disagreed with the view of an explosion similar diversification and emergence of modern birds after the extinction of the dinosaurs at the turn of Cretaceous / Tertiary and in favor of a much earlier diversification. He discovered in the 1990s, new types of Enantiornithes ( Neuquenornis volans, 1993, by Jorge Calvo ) from the Mesozoic of Argentina.

He belongs to the Erstbeschreibern of bird-like theropod ( a Alvarezsaurier, of them 1993 a genus Mononykus assigned ) from Mongolia, they einordneten as flightless bird, as well as Shuvuuia from Mongolia. This classification is due to certain anatomical similarities to birds, but not prevailed.

Chiappe also dealt with reproduction, brood rearing and development of sauropods. Chiappe was with Lowell Dingus and Rodolfo Coria 1997/99 one of the discoverers of the site of Auca sauropod nests in Mahuevo in Patagonia with very well-preserved eggs and embryos.

He is with Ursula B. Göhlich describer of Juravenator.

He received a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Humboldt Research Prize, which he studied in Munich in 2005. He received the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Award of the Humboldt Foundation.

Writings

• The Rise of Birds, in DEG Briggs, PR Crowther (eds.) Palaeobiology II A Synthesis, Cambridge University Press, 2001, pp. 101-106
• With Lowell Dingus: The tiniest giants: discovering dinosaur eggs, Random House 1999
• With Lowell Dingus: Walking on eggs: the astonishing discovery of Thousands of dinosaur eggs in the badlands of Patagonia, Scribner, 2001
• With Dingus, Coria Dinosaur eggs Discovered! : Unscrambling the clues, Minneapolis: Twenty- First Century Books 2008
• Glorified dinosaurs: the origin and early evolution of birds, Wiley 2007
• Editor with Lawrence M. Witmer: Mesozoic birds: above the heads of dinosaurs, University of California Press 2002 therein by Chiappe: Basal Bird Phylogeny: Problems and Solutions, 448-472 and CA Walker: Skeletal morphology and systematics of the Cretaceous Euenantiornithes ( Ornithothoraces: Enantiornithes ), 240-267