Norman D. Newell
Norman Dennis Newell ( born January 27, 1909 in Chicago, † April 18, 2005 in Leonia, New Jersey) was an American paleontologist and a pioneer of paleoecology, who explored the causes and consequences of mass extinctions in Earth's history. His students include Niles Eldredge and Stephen Jay Gould. After the publication of his book On Creation and Evolution: Myth or Reality, a popular science dealing with creationism, he made in the 1980s on global warming attentive and made the case that we are currently " one of the largest mass extinction " of the earth's experiencing.
Life
Newell studied geology at the University of Kansas and graduated with Bachelors and Masters from. His Ph.D. studies, he graduated from the University of Chicago. In 1929 he began his professional career with a spot at the Kansas Geological Survey. From 1937 to 1945 he taught at the University of Wisconsin and then moved to a position as a curator in the Department of Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History, while at the same time he taught geology at Columbia University. He held for four decades These bodies.
At first, he dealt with the geological history of the Andes, the evolution of living and extinct sea shells and the ecology and formation of coral reefs. 1937 and 1942 he published two monographs on fossil Pelecypoden, where he tried to set the shape of the fossil with the biological function in relationship. In 1950 he turned to the study of mass extinction in Earth's history. First, he explored carbonate sediments and the extinction of mollusks in Texas and then compared his findings with the knowledge of other marine invertebrates in the upper Paleozoic and lower Mesozoic. He came to the conclusion that the mass extinction a result of sea level changes and the withdrawal of shallow, warm were shelf and marginal seas. Further work led him in 1952 to Raroia, an atoll in the South Pacific, and in the 1960s to the Bahamas to the coral reefs of the Bahama Banks. During this time, he contributed to the written by several authors, two volumes of the Treatise on Invertebrate Paleontology on mussels, which are still a standard work of paleontology today. The systematics there used by Newell for the classification of shellfish was widespread and popular among paleontologists. In 1977 he was appointed to the end of his playing career, curator emeritus.
Even in retirement Newell published scientific papers. In the 1980s, Newell employed in addition to the exchange of his findings to a wider audience and wrote On Creation and Evolution to show among other things, the incompatibility of scientific knowledge with creationist theories. In further studies, he compared the impact of humans in the 20th century on the nature with the mass extinction of Earth's history and saw this surpassed by the mass extinction of animal species by the action of man.
Honors and Awards
Newell was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Philosophical Society. In 1949 he was president of the Society for the Study of Evolution, and 1960/61, the Paleontological Society. He has authored numerous scientific papers and several books. His numerous prizes for academic achievements include, among other awards from the National Academy of Sciences, Yale University and the American Museum of Natural History. In 1990 he received the Penrose Medal of the Geological Society of America. The American Geological Institute in 2004 elevated him to the rank of Legendary Geoscientist ( " Legendary Geoscientist ").