Born this day in 1897: Tilly Edinger (1897–1967), paleontologist whose ground-breaking work established the discipline of paleoneurolgy
Tilly
Edinger was born in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1897. She studied psychology,
zoology, and geology, and completed a doctorate in natural philosophy at the
University of Frankfort in 1921. Like many women scientists of her era, she
began her career as an unpaid research assistant. After working in this unpaid
position for several years, Edinger became the curator of fossil vertebrates at
the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt.
The museum protected her
Jewish identity for as long as it could, but the rise of Nazism finally drove Edinger
out of Germany in 1939. By that time she had earned an international reputation
for her studies in the comparative brain anatomy of fossils, vertebrates in
particular. In 1940 Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology offered her a
research position. She moved to Massachusetts that year and became a U.S.
citizen in 1945. She received fellowships from both the Guggenheim Foundation (1943–1944)
and the American Association of
University Women (1950–1951). She served as president of the Society of
Vertebrate Paleontology from 1963 to 1964.
Edinger was the first
paleontologist to systematically study, compare, and summarize fossil brain
data. She showed that
evolution of the brain could—and should—be determined by studying the fossil
record (using cranial casts). Until her work, ideas about the evolution of the
brain were based on comparing modern species and assumed that the brain
structure advanced at a constant rate over time—a notion she proved was
incorrect.
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