Robert L. Carroll
Robert Lynn Carroll ( born May 5, 1938 in Kalamazoo, Michigan) is a vertebrate paleontologist, an expert on Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians and reptiles. Caroll lives with his wife Anna Dituri and his son David in Montreal.
Robert Lynn Carroll grew up as an only child on a farm near Lansing, the capital of the U.S. state of Michigan, on. His father led him shortly after his fifth birthday in paleontology, and age of eight, he had already decided to be vertebrate paleontologist. In the same year he got for Christmas the left femur of an Allosaurus, a large predatory dinosaur, given that the paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert had donated after Father Carroll had told this by his son and his interest in fossils. Allosaurus was a short time before discovered by Colbert in Wyoming in 1942. As a teenager, Robert Caroll accompanied his parents on many trips to collect fossils in Wyoming and South Dakota.
After graduating from high school he went to Michigan State University, where he took a BSc in Geology from. Then he studied biology and paleontology at Harvard University under Alfred Sherwood Romer. His dissertation dealt with the Paleozoic amphibians group of Dissorophidae.
Carroll is Professor of Biology at McGill University and the author or co-author of a large number of scientific publications on fossil vertebrates as well as some monographs, books on more general issues as well as textbooks.
His research interests include each other the origin of land vertebrates, the origin and early evolutionary radiation of amniotes, the emergence of the group of Lissamphibia and the relations of its members and the anatomy and evolutionary links of Paleozoic and Mesozoic amphibians and reptiles. In addition, he is working on large-scale patterns and processes of vertebrate evolution, and tried on the analysis of Mesozoic marine reptiles to gain insights into control factors that control the processes and speed of evolution.
In 1978 Charles Schuchert Award of the Caroll Paleontological Society. He became an honorary member of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, and in 2004 the Romer -Simpson Medal awarded him in 2001.