Jack Sepkoski

John Joseph "Jack" Sepkoski ( born July 26, 1948 in Presque Isle, Maine; † 1 May 1999 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American paleontologist.

Life

Sepkoski studied at the University of Notre Dame, where he in 1970 his bachelor's degree magnum cum laude in 1977 and made ​​his doctorate under Stephen Jay Gould at Harvard University in geology. Topic of the thesis was the Geology and Paleontology of the Black Hills in South Dakota. From 1974 he taught at the University of Rochester and from 1978 at the University of Chicago, where he became Associate Professor in 1982 and Professor in 1986. He was also in Chicago and the Field Museum of Natural History. He died of heart failure due to high blood pressure in his home in Chicago's Hyde Park.

Sepkoski presented extensive global lists of families and genera of fossil marine fauna with the aim of identifying evolutionary patterns. In 1981, he was so out of the analysis of 2800 families three large Faunenklassen which successively ablösten in evolution: a Cambrian, dominated by trilobites, Paleozoic, dominated by brachiopods with the peak in the Ordovician, and a modern fauna, in accordance with the mass extinction Perm rise and is dominated by mollusks. With his Chicago colleague David M. Raup, he found a cycle of 26 million years in the extinction. As an attempt to explain the Nemesis hypothesis is proposed.

In 1983 he was awarded the Charles Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society, which he was president from 1995 to 1996. He was a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences. 1983 to 1986 he was co-editor of the journal Paleobiology.

He was married and had a son.