At 80, paleontologist Mary Dawson maintains a piercing interest in the origins of early life on Earth
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Mary Dawson, in her office at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. -
Mary Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, during the 2007 expedition to Haughton Crater on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. -
Longtime paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Mary Dawson, looks through the shelves of skeletons at the museum.
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Mary Dawson has a saying: "Old paleontologists never die. Their knees just give out."
Sitting in her cozy, cluttered office in the back corridors of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, Ms. Dawson grins at what she calls her " bum knee" and notes that she is 80 years old -- but otherwise this pioneering student of life's beginnings is showing no signs of hanging up her pickax.
Ten years ago, she told the Post-Gazette that the Arctic "was no longer an option for me. I'm an orthopedic surgeon's nightmare."
She appears to have proven the doctors wrong. Not only has Ms. Dawson, curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, visited Canada's High Arctic five times in the past decade, where she helped discover an entirely new species of animal, she's already planning to return there the summer after next.
"I'm retired, but all that means is I don't have to go to meetings or correct papers. I can do exactly what I want to do," she says, with a glance around her office, jammed with books, maps, a microscope, an enormous computer and, at a nearby desk, dozens of small plastic and cardboard boxes, each containing a tiny bone fragment of a fossil rodent from millions of years ago.
In the meantime, she continues to rack up honors. Recently, a $50,000 pre-doctoral fellowship was endowed in Ms. Dawson's name by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology, providing individual $3,000 grants to students. The society in 2002 had awarded her the A.S. Romer-G.G. Simpson Medal, its highest honor. She was the first American woman to receive this.
Besides being widely recognized as one of the greatest fossil researchers of her time, whose discoveries have rewritten textbooks, Ms. Dawson might also be the first octogenarian paleontologist to appear on the cover of an in-flight airline magazine -- the July-August 2010 issue of Above and Beyond, to be exact, published by First Air, "The Airline of the North."
"The Search for a Missing Link," the headline reads, and inside are full-color photos of Ms. Dawson and her much younger colleagues, in glowing, rude health, at their campsite on Canada's Devon Island, the largest uninhabited island in the world. There is also, tellingly, another photo of Ms. Dawson's colleague climbing out of the arctic mud, her all-terrain vehicle sinking in the background.
First Published March 13, 2011 12:00 am
