Mary Dawson
In
1962, the director of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, PA
told Mary Dawson, "No woman will ever be a curator here." He sure was
wrong! Since 1972, Dr. Mary Dawson has been the curator of Vertebrate
Paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History and the chair of the
Division of Earth Sciences. The museum is home to the fourth largest collection
in North America. The collection is still growing strong. The museum is building
a new
dinosaur hall called Dinosaurs
in Their World. Construction began in the Spring of 2005.
Dr. Dawson grew up in Michigan, graduated from Michigan State University, and
got her Ph.D. from the University of Kansas. Dr. Dawson's love of animals began
when she was a child on the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Her research focuses on
the beginnings of rodents, rabbits, and hares. She and her research team,
working in the Arctic in the 1970s and '80s, discovered the first fossils of
Tertiary land animals that documented a northerly migration route between North
America and Europe. That is the theory of plate
tectonics.
Dr. Dawson has won many awards for her work. In 2002, she became the first
American woman to receive the A.S. Romer-G.G. Simpson Medal, the Society of
Vertebrate Paleontology's highest honor.
Dr. Dawson is proud of the work she does at the museum. She believes, the
museum's "real goal is to encourage their (children's) interest in
science."
Image courtesy of Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Photo by Melinda McNaugher
For more information:
http://www.carnegiemuseums.org/cmag/bk_issue/1998/marapr/feat4.htm
http://www.eserver.org/zine375/issue2/zine9.html
http://www.bmdco.on.ca/dr__mary_dawson.htm
http://www.dinosaur.org/bzdawson.htm
by Indraneel, fourth grade, 2005
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