Return to this week's Bulletin
Order a copy of Jerry's book Earth's First Steps exclusively from SAS!
14 September 2001
SAS Welcome Jerry MacDonald as Scientific and Technical Advisor
by Shawn Carlson
I am very pleased and honored to add Jerry MacDonald to our distinguished list of Scientific and Technical Advisors. After brilliant scientific detective work and an enormous effort in which this citizen paleontologist literally moved a mountain, Jerry made what some paleontologists have called the discovery of the 1980s. He found perfectly preserved animal tracks that were over a quarter of a billion years old, from the Permian period, just before the age of the dinosaurs. But when he brought his collection of fossil footprints to the New Mexico State University’s Department of Geological Sciences he found only cynics. The area where he made his finds harbored nothing of interest, they insisted. Some even denied the impressions were footprints at all. But Jerry had carefully studied the area for over three years and using the skills of a master detective he painstakingly reconstructed how the area might have looked 270 million years earlier and discovered his impressions on what once was a muddy bed of a primitive swamp. He knew what he had and he didn’t need a Ph.D.ed professor to validate it.
When he took his fossils to Nick Hotton of the Smithsonian Institution, he got a completely different reaction. Hotton immediately recognized the footprints as some of the most important Paleozoic fossils ever found. These fossils have revealed more about how proto-dinosaurs moved, fed and hunted than do the fragmentary skeletal remains from that period. The importance of the find for understanding the evolution of life on earth can not be overstated.
Jerry has published numerous peer-reviewed papers on his find. In 1995, he published Earth’s First Steps, a popular book detailing his adventures in paleontology. Sadly, Jerry, whose physical prowess once astonished his professional colleagues, now suffers from the debilitating effects of Multiple Sclerosis, so he’s no longer hopping boulders with fossil-laden satchels casually tossed over a convenient shoulder. Nevertheless, the fruits of his effort will enrich human understanding as long as culture endures.
Earth’s First Steps tells an inspiring tale of discovery that every citizen scientist should read. Sadly, it’s out of print. But we have them, and they are all autographed by Jerry MacDonald himself. The price is just $17.25– that’s 25 percent off the list price.
