Mary Dawson

Mary grew up in Michigan. As a child, she was interested in animals. This led her to study zoology as an undergraduate student at Michigan State College (now Michigan State University). She later went to the University of Edinburgh in Scotland on a Fulbright Scholarship, then returned to the United States and earned a Ph.D. from the University of Kansas in 1958. During her time as a student, Mary was the only woman studying in her specialty, and she was not always welcome. Her peers would not let her join their field crews:

“They didn’t want women along, and I looked and looked and finally found one with a fellow who took his wife along. Isn’t that disgusting? It annoyed me, but you go around those annoyances.”

— Mary Dawson (2000), as quoted in “The Bone Collector,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

After receiving her doctorate, Mary bounced around for a while. She worked in Switzerland as postdoc, a type of temporary research position. She then returned to the United States and worked briefly at Smith College in Massachusetts, then at the Yale Peabody Museum in Connecticut, and, finally, at the National Science Foundation in Washington, D.C.

In 1962, she joined the staff of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she spent the remainder of her career. Early in her career at the museum, the Director told her that she would not be promoted to a high level because she was a woman. After working at the Carnegie Museum for less than a decade, Mary was promoted to Curator under that same director. Somewhat cryptically, Mary said that his change in attitude resulted from the Director having had “a real learning experience” during those years.

Mary specialized in studying small mammals, especially lagomorphs (the group that includes rabbits, hares, and pikas) and rodents (mice, rats, and relatives), although she also studied other fossils. Because of the small size of the fossils that she was studying, Mary had to carefully and meticulously search for them, walking slowly or even crawling over the ground. She also used screens to sieve the sediment (dirt) that contained tiny fossils. During sieving, small particles of dirt fall through the screen, whereas larger particles, including fossils, are left behind. Thus, sieving makes small fossils easier to find.

Mary began going to the Arctic in the 1970s to look for fossils. Based on similarities between fossil terrestrial (land-dwelling) animals found in Europe and North America—as well as accumulating geological evidence—scientists had hypothesized that a land bridge may once have connected far northeastern North America to northwestern Europe in the past. Mary was interested in uncovering evidence for this land bridge and thought that it could be found in rocks on Ellesmere Island, an island in far northern Canada near Greenland.

Mary’s first trip to Ellesmere Island was in 1973. Working in the Arctic is both costly and risky because the field sites are very remote and small planes are used to reach them. The 1973 field crew, which included Mary and three colleagues—J. Howard Hutchinson, Paul Raemakers, and Robert “Mac” West—had to take a flight to Cornwallis Island, where the Canadian Polar Continental Shelf Project had a station on Resolute Bay. From there, they flew to Ellesmere Island in an Otter, a type of small propeller plane:

“Clear days in Resolute were few and far between, but as long as the fog wasn’t ‘down to the deck,’ the otters were in the air. The midnight sun that defines the Arctic summer means that you could be placed in camp at any time, day or night, and many can speak about camp moves in the wee hours, when the weather miraculously breaks and a hole the size of an otter appears above. There was the three-hour otter ride from Resolute Bay to central Ellesmere that ended in a stomach-churning landing on tilted, frost-heaved terrain where, from above, no one (aside from a well-seasoned bush pilot) would ever dream of landing. When the aircraft lurched to a stop, its occupants gingerly disembarked, as if stepping out onto the moon.”

— Jaelyn J. Eberle and Malcolm C. McKenna (2007), from “The indefatigable Mary R. Dawson: Arctic pioneer”

Once the passengers and their equipment were unloaded, the small plane left, and the field crew was on its own (they had a radio for communication, when necessary). The 1973 trip was a disappointment. Mary recalled:

“We found nothing. We spent six weeks looking for fossils every day . . . . It was very discouraging.”

— Mary Dawson (2000), as quoted in “The Bone Collector,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Nevertheless, Mary returned and met with success on a follow-up trip in 1975. Mary and Mac found fossils of terrestrial animals on Strathcona Fjord in western Ellesmere Island. These animals were from Eocene rocks (about 56 million years old to 35 million years old) of the Eureka Sound Formation.

Ellesmere Island is within the Arctic Circle and has a very cold climate today; it was at a similar latitude in the Eocene. Mary and Mac found fossil remains of turtles and alligators, neither of which would survive on modern Ellesmere Island. Their discoveries showed that the Arctic was much warmer in the past. The fossils also provided evidence that an ancient high-latitude land bridge between North America and Europe was plausible. The existence of this land bridge—called the North Atlantic Land Bridge or NALB—has since been supported by many other studies and is now widely accepted.

Mary continued making trips to the Arctic into her 70s; she made at least eleven trips over her research career. In addition to Ellesmere Island, she went to Axel Heiberg, Banks, Bylot, Devon, and Ellef Ringnes islands in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. She had many memorable experiences. During a trip in 1977, a wolf sprang at her, getting close enough to leave spittle on her face. On an airplane ride between camps on Ellef Ringnes and Banks islands—probably sometime in the late 1970s or early 1980s—she and Mac West met author Barry Lopez. They later made a brief appearance in his award-winning book Arctic Dreams, where he described listening to their conversation about the ancient Arctic landscape and the ups and downs of their time in the field.

Mary was chair of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History Earth Sciences Division for many years (1973–1997) and worked as a Curator until 2003; she continued to do research as a Curator Emerita following her official retirement. In 2007, she and a student, Elizabeth Ross, discovered the fossil skeleton of an early Miocene (23 to 20.4 million-year-old) pinniped—pinnipeds are the group that includes seals and sea lions—while collecting fossils on Devon Island in the Canadian Arctic. Mary and her collaborators later named the animal Puijila darwini and hypothesized that it lived in freshwater. The discovery was heralded in the press as a “missing link” between modern pinnipeds and their land-dwelling ancestors.

Mary remained active in research and continued going to her office in the Carnegie Museum until the museum was temporarily closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020. She died later the same year, at the age of 89. One of her colleagues at the Carnegie Museum wrote:

“Mary was a true living legend, the matriarch of vertebrate paleontology at our museum, but despite her eminence she was also exceedingly humble and beloved by virtually everyone who had the pleasure of knowing her.”

— Matthew C. Lamanna (2021), in the memorial to Mary R. Dawson in Acta Palaeontologica Polonica

Mary was the second woman president of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology after Tilly Edinger, serving from 1973 to 1974. She received many honors for her accomplishments. She was given the Arnold Guyot Memorial Award by the National Geographic Society in 1981. In 2002, she was awarded the Romer-Simpson medal, the highest honor given by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology. She was the second woman and the first American woman to receive the Romer-Simpson medal, which was first given in 1987. She was made a Paleontological Society Fellow in 2006. The Carnegie museum established a Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology position in Mary’s name, and the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology honored her by creating the Mary R. Dawson Grant for graduate student research in 2011.

Selected works by Mary Dawson

Beard, K.C., Y. Tong, M.R. Dawson, J. Wang, and X. Huang. 1996. Earliest complete dentition of an anthropoid primate from the late middle Eocene of Shanxi Province, China. Science 272: 82–85. Link

Dawson, M.R. 2003. Paleogene rodents of Eurasia. In J.W.F. Reumer and W. Wessels, eds. Distribution and migration of Tertiary mammals in Eurasia. A volume in honour of Hans de Bruijn. Deinsea 10: 97–126. Link

Dawson, M.R., R.M. West, W. Langston Jr., and J.H. Hutchison. 1976. Paleogene terrestrial vertebrates: Northernmost occurrence, Ellesmere Island, Canada. Science 192: 781–782. Link

Dawson, M.R., L. Marivaux, C.-k. Li, K.C. Beard, and G. Métais. 2006. Laonastes and the “Lazarus Effect” in recent mammals. Science 311: 1456–1458. Link

Rybczynski, N., M.R. Dawson, and R.H. Tedford. 2009. A semi-aquatic Arctic mammalian carnivore from the Miocene epoch and origin of Pinnipedia. Nature 458: 1021–1027. Link

Biographical references & further reading

Beard, K.C., and Z.-X. Luo. 2007. Mammalian paleontology on a global stage: A tribute to Mary R. Dawson. Bulletin of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History 39: 1–5. Link

Black, R. 2021. Daring to Dig. Carnegie Magazine, Spring 2021. Link

Carpenter, M. 2000. The bone collector. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 19 March 2000. Link

Carpenter, M. 2011. At 80, paleontologist Mary Dawson maintains a piercing interest in the origins of early life on earth. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 13 March 2011. Link

Crompton, J. 2020. Mary R. Dawson: Pioneer of polar paleontology. Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 13 December 2020. Link

CTV.ca News Staff. 2009. Canadian fossil find sheds light on seal evolution. CTV News, 22 April 2009. Link

Eberle, J., and M.C. McKenna. 2007. The indefatigable Mary R. Dawson: Arctic pioneer. Bulletin of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History 39: 7–16. Link

Fostowicz-Frelik, Ł., and M.C. Lamanna. 2021. Mary R. Dawson (1931–2020). Acta Palaeontologica Polonica 66: 84. Link

Lopez, B. 1986. Arctic Dreams. Vintage Books, New York.

Obituary: A brief tribute to Mary Dawson. McDonald-Aeberli Funeral Home, Inc. No date. Link

Prehistoric Planet: Interview with Dr. Mary R. Dawson. (no date.) Link

Stricker, B. 2017. Daring to dig : Adventures of women in American paleontology. PRI Special Publication No. 54. Paleontological Research Institution, Ithaca, New York.

van der Geer, A. no date. Mary Dawson: Breaking the ice. Trowelblazers. Link