Dart, Raymond Arthur
Dart, Raymond Arthur (1893–1988) [Bi].South African anthropologist best known for his discovery of the first Australopithecine fossil in 1924. Born in Brisbane, he trained as a doctor at Sydney University Medical School before serving in WW1 with the Australian army medical corps. After the war he went to London to pursue his research in brain anatomy at University College. At the age of 30 he was appointed Professor of Anatomy at the fledgling Medical School in the University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, a post he remained in until his retirement. In 1924 he was shown a fossil skull from Taungs near Kimberley and realized that it was an extremely early hominid of a type previously unrecognized. He named it Australopithecus, much to the dismay of those in the academic world who realized that the word was a cocktail of Greek and Latin. Although the place of Australopithecus in hominid evolution at the time of its discovery was hotly...
[The entire page is 203 words long]