October 29, 1999
Contact: W. Bradley M. Kemp, Natural History Museum, (785) 864-4540.
LAWRENCE -- The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, an international scholarly organization, has awarded its highest honor to a retired University of Kansas professor whose decades-long career is widely regarded as one of the most distinguished in the field.
Robert W. Wilson, professor emeritus of ecology and evolutionary biology and curator emeritus of the KU Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center, garnered the Romer-Simpson Medal at the society's annual meeting last week in Denver. Wilson's work on the evolution of rodents and the geological sequence of Europe and North America is considered a signal achievement in paleontology in the 20th century, said Larry D. Martin, the museum's curator of vertebrate paleontology.
"The Romer-Simpson medal is awarded for outstanding scholarship and service to the discipline," Martin said. "Few scientists can rival Dr. Wilson's achievements or his professional longevity - he continues his research even at age 90."
Wilson is a former Guggenheim scholar and Fulbright scholar and is a fellow of the National Geographic Society.
Also at its meeting in Denver, the society gave its A.S. Romer Prize to Katrina Gobetz, Windsor, Conn., graduate student in ecology and evolutionary biology. The prize is given annually to a predoctoral paleontology student who has made an outstanding contribution to the science of vertebrate paleontology. It is awarded on the basis of the scientific value of a student's work and the quality of an oral presentation of that work.
At the meeting, Gobetz presented the results of her work on the eating habits of elephants whose fossils are found in the Kansas River near Lawrence. She used fossil tartar from the teeth of American mastodon fossils to establish that they had eaten not only tree leaves, as had been previously thought, but also grasses.
Both prizes are named for Alfred Sherwood Romer, the late American paleontologist who was a professor and director of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University. The Romer-Simpson Medal also is named for George Gaylord Simpson, the late University of Arizona professor who is widely thought to be the most influential paleontologist of the century.