Distinguished palaeontologist David Raup from the University of Chicago has died. He was 82. Raup was an innovator who undertook some of the major questions in palaeontology, including mass extinctions and biologic diversity in the fossil record. He promoted usage of computation and quantitative methods in palaeontological research at a time when computers were still in their infancy. Probably best known for his work on mass extinction, he and his collaborator Jack Sepkoski found two components to extinction, a slow background rate, interrupted by rare and possibly periodic mass extinctions. A true legend who will definitely be missed!
Raup’s former students and colleagues uniformly praised his unique creativity along with his astute capabilities as an academic adviser, senior colleague, and paleontological statesman. They remember him for the sweeping scope of the questions he asked, his analytical and quantitative rigor, and his skepticism and humility.
“David Raup ushered in a renaissance in paleontology,” said former student and colleague Charles Marshall, SM’86, PhD’89, director of the University of California’s Museum of Paleontology and professor of integrative biology at UC Berkeley. “Before Dave, much of the discipline was centered on describing what was. Dave taught the discipline to think about the processes that might have generated the past record.”
He introduced statistical concepts to paleontology that treated the fossil record as an outcome of yet-to-be-discovered processes. Thus did Raup, as Marshall put it, create new intellectual space for paleontology.
“That was in my opinion his greatest contribution. It is not that Dave just transformed the discipline, but his students, and their students, continue to fill and expand that space,” Marshall said.
Another former student and colleague, Michael Foote, expressed similar sentiments.
“By any conception of what it means to be influential, Dave was one of the most influential paleontologists active during the second half of the 20th century,” said Foote, SM’88, PhD’89, a professor in geophysical sciences at UChicago. “In the areas he chose to touch, nobody, in my view, surpassed him.”