Dick Jefferies obituary

My friend Dick Jefferies, who has died aged 88, was an authority on fossils that are too strange to identify and which are sometimes referred to as “problematica”. Central to his work, which he pursued as principal scientific officer in the natural history section of the British Museum, were extinct animals called carpoids.Dick was something of a contrarian in the field of evolutionary biology, and was not afraid to adopt occasionally outlandish positions, some of which were proven to be well wide of the mark. However, a number of his predictions did turn out to be correct. He successfully hypothesised, for instance, that early marine animals (echinoderms) had gill slits equivalent to those of fish, but lost them; and he was also proven right in his conjecture that the closest relatives of vertebrates were sea-squirts (ascidiacea), rather than the more fish-like lancelets (amphioxus).Continue reading...

Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - July 6, 2020 Category: Science Authors: Henry Gee Tags: Biology Evolution Fossils British Museum Source Type: news