Mel Gibson and Esther Acebo appear at Joy Awards
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Canada Jacques Gauthier is a distinguished Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Yale University and Curator at the Yale Peabody Museum, known for his foundational contributions to vertebrate paleontology and phylogenetic systematics.
Consulted on the creation of the museum's gastornis model and featured in the documentary 'When Whales Walked' filmed at the museum. The museum also intends to update 'The Age of Reptiles' mural virtually with his input.
Listed as Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology for 'Hatching the Past' exhibition.
Featured in the documentary 'Dinosaur Wars' on American Experience.
Principal investigator on a NSF-funded project to reconstruct the phylogeny of lizards and snakes (Squamata) using gross anatomy and molecular structure.
Jacques Armand Gauthier was born on June 7, 1948, in New York City. His formal academic journey began at San Diego State University, where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Zoology in 1973. He continued his studies at the same institution, receiving a Master of Science degree in Biology in 1980. Gauthier then pursued his doctoral degree at the University of California, Berkeley, completing his Ph.D. in Paleontology in 1984. These early academic pursuits laid the groundwork for his extensive career in understanding the evolution and relationships of reptiles, including birds.
Gauthier’s career is marked by significant contributions to the fields of vertebrate paleontology, comparative morphology, and systematics. He is recognized as one of the founders of cladistics in biology, a method for classifying organisms based on shared derived characteristics. His master’s thesis, published in 1982, became a seminal work on the paleontology and phylogeny of the lizard clade Anguimorpha. His Ph.D. thesis presented the first major cladistic analysis of Diapsida and argued for the monophyly of dinosaurs. Following this, his important 1986 paper on the origin of birds from theropods revolutionized dinosaur phylogenetics, shifting classification and understanding to a cladistic framework. Throughout his tenure at Yale University, he has served as a Professor of Earth & Planetary Sciences and Curator at the Yale Peabody Museum.
His work has provided foundational phylogenetic studies of Archosauria and Lepidosauria, and he was the primary author of a widely cited phylogenetic study of Amniota. The phylogenetic character sets developed in his 1984, 1986, and 1988 publications remain central to many gross-anatomy-based phylogenetic analyses. Gauthier has also advocated for replacing Linnaean taxonomy with the PhyloCode, collaborating with Kevin de Queiroz on this initiative. His ongoing research focuses on the anatomy and relationships of diapsids, particularly lepidosaurs, with a current emphasis on Scincomorpha. He is a principal investigator on a National Science Foundation-funded project to reconstruct the phylogeny of lizards and snakes, building on his previous collaborative work establishing the most widely accepted phylogeny for this group.
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