Norman D. Newell

Norman Dennis Newell was an American geologist and paleontologist, a professor of geology at Columbia University and chairman and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Born in Chicago in 1909 and raised in Kansas, he studied at the University of Kansas under Raymond Moore and took his doctorate at Yale. He became an authority on Upper Paleozoic and Mesozoic bivalves and worked on Permian reefs in West Texas, New Mexico and the Bahamas. He wrote on mass extinctions well before the Alvarez hypothesis made such theorising respectable, and at Columbia he trained paleontologists including Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge and Steven Stanley. He died in 2005.