Norman D. Newell

Norman Dennis Newell, known as Norman D. Newell, was an American paleontologist who lived from 1909 to 2005 and held professorships at Columbia University while serving as chairman and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. He was an eminent systematist of Upper Paleozoic and Mesozoic bivalves and fossil mollusks, and his doctoral research on bivalve organisms produced Late Paleozoic Pelecypods: Pectinacea, an influential work bringing zoological concepts into invertebrate paleontology. His research on Permian reefs in West Texas, New Mexico and the Bahamas during the 1940s and 1950s addressed mass extinction patterns well before such theories gained mainstream acceptance, and he later wrote in defense of evolutionary theory against creationism and on human driven climate change as a factor in mass extinction. He trained prominent paleontologists including Stephen Jay Gould and Niles Eldredge, and received the American Museum of Natural History Gold Medal for Achievement in Science. He received the Penrose Medal in 1990.