Background
Alfred Sherwood Romer was born in White Plains, New York, United States, to Fenry Houston Romer, a journalist, and Evelyn Sherwood.
(Man is a member of that series of living creatures known ...)
Man is a member of that series of living creatures known as the vertebrates, or animals with a backbone, a group including not only all the other warm-blooded hairy creatures to which man is closely allied but such varied forms as birds, reptiles, frogs and salamanders, and fishes. Their history is our history; and we cannot properly understand man, his body, his mind, or his activities, unless we understand his vertebrates ancestry.
https://www.amazon.com/Man-vertebrates-Alfred-Sherwood-Romer/dp/B00005WCIA?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B00005WCIA
(Slight yellowing consistent with age. Pages are clean and...)
Slight yellowing consistent with age. Pages are clean and crisp with tight binding.
https://www.amazon.com/Restless-Atom-awakening-nuclear-physics/dp/B002NVVQ9S?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=B002NVVQ9S
(The development of vertebrates is traced in a thorough, c...)
The development of vertebrates is traced in a thorough, comprehensive text containing numerous excellent diagrams and drawings. Classification indices
https://www.amazon.com/Vertebrate-Paleontology-Alfred-Sherwood-Romer/dp/0226724883?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=0226724883
(Based on the work of Samuel Wendell Williston and Dr. W. ...)
Based on the work of Samuel Wendell Williston and Dr. W. K. Gregory, author and editor of the original title published in 1925, this volume consists of two major portions -- a structure-by-structure account of the reptile skeleton, followed by a classification of the various reptile groups based on osteological characters. It was designed to give in outline form an account of the nature of the skeletal system of numerous reptile types living and extinct.
https://www.amazon.com/Osteology-Reptiles-Alfred-Sherwood-Romer/dp/089464985X?SubscriptionId=AKIAJRRWTH346WSPOAFQ&tag=prabook-20&linkCode=sp1&camp=2025&creative=165953&creativeASIN=089464985X
biologist paleontologist professor
Alfred Sherwood Romer was born in White Plains, New York, United States, to Fenry Houston Romer, a journalist, and Evelyn Sherwood.
After completing high school in White Plains, he spent one year working as a railroad clerk. In 1913, he entered Amherst College, where he majored in history and German literature. However, a course on evolution taught by Frederick Brewster Loomis had a profound influence on Romer; indeed, it shaped the course of his life.
Upon his return to the United States in 1919, Romer entered graduate school in biology at Columbia University. There he worked with the talented vertebrate anatomist and paleontologist William King Gregory and completed his Ph. D. in 1921; his dissertation, on the comparative musculature of early reptiles, remains a classic. For the next two years he taught courses in anatomy and embryology at Bellevue Hospital Medical College of New York University.
After graduating in 1917, Romer, like many young men of his time, was eager to join the war effort in Europe. He joined the American Field Service in France, and a few months later enlisted in the U. S. Army.
In 1923, he joined the geology department of the University of Chicago and taught there for eleven years.
In 1934, Romer left Chicago for Harvard University, where he remained for the rest of his career. At Harvard, Romer was a professor of zoology in the biology department and curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He also served as director of the museum from 1946 to 1961. Romer was most famous for his work on the study of fossil animals, particularly reptiles and amphibians from the Permian period of geological time. During his career he published more than 200 papers and books on vertebrate paleontology, the most important of which were technical studies concerning the anatomical structure, classification, and evolutionary relationships of fossil vertebrates. His researches were most fully summed up in two notable works, Vertebrate Paleontology (1933) and Osteology of the Reptiles (1956). Vertebrate Paleontology, by virtue of its detailed descriptions and classification of all major fossil vertebrate groups, was one of the first comprehensive textbooks in that field, and in revised editions served vertebrate paleontologists and biologists as an indispensable resource for over fifty years. Osteology of the Reptiles was a massive sourcebook incorporating a wealth of information on fossil and living reptiles. While Romer was most famous for his work in systematics, he was trained primarily as a biologist and sought to understand ancient organisms as once-living creatures. He devoted much of his early work to reconstructing the muscular and skeletal structure of ancient amphibians and reptiles. His early studies on the origin and development of limbs incorporated research in embryology as well as paleontology. At Chicago, and later at Harvard, his work led to important contributions on the embryonic and evolutionary history of cartilage and bone and on the structure and function of the nervous system among fossil reptiles. Romer's sound knowledge of anatomy, embryology, and neurology was evident in Man and the Vertebrates (1933) and The Vertebrate Body (1949), popular books that were frequently reprinted and widely used in college biology courses. Romer's emphasis on the biological aspects of vertebrate paleontology, a field that bridges both biology and geology, affected his professional associations. That focus created problems in the geology department at the University of Chicago and influenced his decision to accept an appointment at Harvard. His conception of vertebrate paleontology as a dimension of biology resulted in conflicts within the Paleontological Society and led Romer to play a major role in creating a separate Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 1940. Romer's work contributed significantly to the understanding of vertebrate evolutionary history. In a number of technical papers and in The Vertebrate Story (1959), a detailed yet popular description of the evolution of vertebrate life, Romer's investigations helped to define key evolutionary transitions from fish to amphibians, amphibians to reptiles, and reptiles to mammals. His studies described anatomical and physiological adaptations that allowed for the early evolution of fishes and of the first land animals. Those researches led him to examine ancient ecological conditions and to emphasize the importance of freshwater environments for vertebrate evolution, an interpretation that is no longer fully accepted. Although Romer was an expert on vertebrate evolution, he concerned himself with explaining the pattern rather than the causal mechanisms of evolutionary change. He rarely commented on the factors that produced evolution; however, he was committed to the Darwinian theory of evolution by natural selection and was a staunch opponent of any teleological explanation. Romer was among the first students of fossil vertebrates to lend plausibility to the hypothesis of continental drift. While most geologists and vertebrate paleontologists remained wedded to the concept of stable land masses and ocean basins and explained the geographical distribution of animals on the basis of migration, Romer in the mid-1940's became aware of striking similarities between Permian reptiles in western Texas and in Czechoslovakia and began seriously to consider the possibility that the continents were once joined and had subsequently drifted apart. During the next twenty-five years Romer brought evidence from vertebrate paleontology to bear on the understanding of continental drift. Romer likewise contributed to vertebrate paleontology in other respects. Although he originally had little background in fieldwork and no formal training in geology, he developed active programs of exploration. At Chicago, Romer and his principal assistant Paul Miller undertook field trips to Texas, New Mexico, and South Africa that led to the development of one of the world's leading collections of Permian vertebrates. Those specimens, originally housed in the former Walker Museum of the University of Chicago, are now in the Field Museum of Natural History. Later investigations led to the discovery of fossils in Argentina that offered valuable new information on the origin of mammals. His discoveries added substantially to the collections of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, and Romer, a popular teacher, employed those materials to train dozens of students in vertebrate paleontology and zoology. For his scientific contributions, Romer received several honorary doctorates as well as prestigious awards from the National Academy of Sciences, the Geological Society of America, and other professional organizations. As director of the museum, he helped revive a moribund institution and transformed it into one of the premier centers for the study of evolution.
(Man is a member of that series of living creatures known ...)
(The development of vertebrates is traced in a thorough, c...)
(Based on the work of Samuel Wendell Williston and Dr. W. ...)
(Slight yellowing consistent with age. Pages are clean and...)
Romer met Ruth Hibbard; they were married in 1924 and subsequently had three children.
Romer died in Cambridge, Massachussets, United States