Dale Russell

Dale Alan Russell ( * December 27 1937 in San Francisco, California ) is a Canadian paleontologist who deals with dinosaurs.

Russell studied at the University of Oregon (1958) and the University of California, Berkeley ( Master's degree 1960) and in 1964 received his doctorate at Columbia University in geology. As a post - graduate student, he was 1964/65 at Yale University. After that, he was from 1965 curator of vertebrate paleontology at the National Museum of Canada in Ottawa, where he was Paleobiology 1977 Director of the Department. From 1995, he was Senior Curator at the Museum of Natural History at North Carolina State University. He has been a professor in the Faculty of Geosciences. He is now professor emeritus. He is an adjunct professor at California State University, Sacramento. In 1996 he was awarded the Bancroft Award of the Royal Society of Canada.

Russell was involved in the very abundant dinosaur excavations in Alberta ( Dinosaur Provincial Park ) and in the 1980s with Philip J. Currie and Dong Zhiming organizer of a Canadian- Chinese joint project for dinosaur digs. He named several species of dinosaurs, including the tyrannosaurids Daspletosaurus and various dinosaurs that he had with found at excavations in China.

He speculated early on extraterrestrial causes for the extinction of the dinosaurs (at that time a supernova ) and speculated about a hypothetical intelligent end product of dinosaur evolution, if it were not extinct, a Dinosauroid (after Russell most likely emerged from Troodon ), as well as Carl Sagan in Dragons of Eden (1977). He also wrote about the implications of paleontological research on the question of extraterrestrial life.

Writings

• Islands in the cosmos. The evolution of terrestrial life, Indiana University Press 2009
• An Odyssey in Time. The Dinosaurs of North America, University of Toronto Press 1989