David Dunkle

David Hosbrook Dunkle (September 9, 1911 – January 3, 1984) was a paleontologist associated with the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of Natural History. His research and published works focused mainly on fish fossils. The genus Dunkleosteus is named in his honor.

Biography

Dunkle was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and grew up in Indiana, United States. He attended the University of Kansas and Harvard University. At Harvard, he studied under Alfred Romer and obtained his PhD in 1939. Afterward, he worked at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History (CMNH), where he studied and published papers about arthrodires from the Cleveland area. He also led two trips to the west to bolster the museum's collection of fossils in the 1940s.[1] A notable object he collected for the museum was CMNH 7541, a dinosaur skull upon which the controversial Nanotyrannus genus is based on. After Dunkle collected the skull in 1942, Charles W. Gilmore described the genus in 1946, classifying it as a new species in the tyrannosaur genus Gorgosaurus.[2]

Dunkle left the CMNH in 1946 to work as a vertebrate paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History, although he continued working with the CMNH and returned in the 1960s to advise the museum on an operation salvaging fossils from Interstate 71. He left the National Museum in March 1968, and worked at the CMNH until he retired in 1975. After retirement, he moved to Virginia. He died in Tappahannock on January 3, 1984.[1][3]

Legacy
Juvenile Dunkleosteus terrelli skull, Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Through his lifetime, Dunkle published around fifty papers that mostly deal with the fossils of fish.[1] The genus Dunkleosteus was named after him while still working at the CMNH, then as curator of vertebrate paleontology, in 1956.[4]


Selected publications
  • Dunkle, David Hosbrook (November 1951). "New Western Hemisphere occurrences of fossil selachians". Journal of the Washington Academy of Sciences. 41 (11): 344-347.
  • Dunkle, David Hosbrook; Bungart, Peter Anthony; Bull, Edith (1946). "The antero-supragnathal of Gorgonichthys. American Museum novitates ; no. 1316". Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
  • Schaeffer, Bobb; Dunkle, David Hosbrook; Walcott, Charles D. (1950). "A semionotid fish from the Chinle Formation, with consideration of its relationships. American Museum novitates ; no. 1457". Cite journal requires |journal= (help)
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References
  1. "Dunkle, David Hosbrook". Encyclopedia of Cleveland History. Case Western Reserve University.
  2. C.W. Gilmore (1946). "A new carnivorous dinosaur from the Lance Formation of Montana". Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. 106: 1–19.
  3. "SIA RU000156, United States National Museum Division of Vertebrate Paleontology, Records, circa 1889-1957". Smithsonian Institution Archives.
  4. Robert K. Carr; William J. Hlavin (September 2, 1995). "Les Dinichthyidae (Placodermi): une fiction paléontologique?". Geobios. 28: 85–87. doi:10.1016/S0016-6995(95)80092-1.
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