Spartan Profiles: Mary Dawson
HER JURASSIC PARK
Jurassic Park was a fantasy world in a couple of Steven Spielberg movies. But you can say it’s a very real environment in the work of Mary Dawson, ’52, curator of Vertebrate Paleontology at Carnegie Museum of Natural History—the finest Jurassic dinosaur collection in the world with more than 103,000 specimens. “Interest and excitement in my field has never left me,” says Dawson, in her 40th year with the museum and the first woman to win the prestigious A.S. Romer-G.G. Simpson Medal from the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.
Ironically, though she is surrounded by fossils of some of the largest creatures ever to live, she has specialized, as she says, “In the little guys—rabbits and rodents. I have done field work all over the northern hemisphere, including in high latitudes of the Canadian Artic. My discoveries there of the first Tertiary terrestial vertebrates were among my major achievements.”
A native of Menominee, she came to MSU to study veterinary medicine. “I soon decided that long dead animals, not sick living ones, should be my focus,” says Mary. “My years of undergraduate work at MSC were great! I recall a variety of excellent teachers, including Jane Smith in geology and Jim Braddock in zoology.”
Speaking of her field, she likes that “it involved deciphering a tantalizing record of more or less complete plant and animal remains—a fascinating field even after being a practicioner for 50 years.”
Does she have a theory on the extinction of dinosaurs? “Theorizing on why this event occurred must include all possible information, not only of meteorite impact(s) but also of the far reaching environmental effects of the origin of the flowering plants early in the Cretaceous. We have a long way to go before that extinction interval is convincingly interpreted.”
