J. William Schopf
| J. William Schopf | |
|---|---|
| Born |
September 27, 1941 Urbana, Illinois, U.S. |
| Other names | Bill Schopf |
| Residence | Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Nationality | American |
| Fields |
Paleobiology Evolutionary biology |
| Institutions | University of California Los Angeles |
| Alma mater | Oberlin College, Harvard University |
| Known for | Microfossils |
| Notable awards |
Mary Clark Thompson Medal (1986) Oparin Medal (1989) Paleontological Society Medal (2012) Charles Doolittle Walcott Medal (2013) |
| Spouse |
Julie Morgan (m. 1966; div. 1979) Jane Shen-Miller (m. 1980) |
| Children | James Christopher |
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Website epss |
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James William Schopf (born September 27, 1941) is an American paleobiologist and professor of earth sciences at the University of California Los Angeles. He is also Director of the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, and a member of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA. He is most well known for his study of Precambrian prokaryotic life in Australia's Apex chert. Schopf has published extensively in the peer reviewed literature about the origins of life on Earth. He is the first to discover Precambrian microfossils in stromatolitic sediments of Australia (1965), South Africa (1966), Russia (1977), India (1978), and China (1984). He served as NASA's principal investigator of lunar samples during 1969–1974.
James William Schopf was born in Urbana, Illinois, to father James W. Schopf, a paleontologist, and mother Esther Schopf, a school teacher. He was educated at Oberlin College, from where he grauduated with AB degree in high honours in 1963. He joined Harvard University in 1963 and earned AM degree in 1965, and PhD in 1968. He was immediately appointed to the faculty of the University of California Los Angeles as Assistant Professor of Paleobiology. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1970, and to full Professor in 1973. Since 1984 he holds a join post of Director of Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life at UCLA.
Schopf is the discoverer of one of the oldest microfossils on Earth. He was the first to discover Precambrian fossils around the world. In 1987, with Bonnie M. Packer, he reported the discovery of microfossils from the Early Archean Apex Basalt and Towers Formation of northwestern Western Australia. He suggested that the apparent cells were cyanobacteria, and therefore oxygen-producing photosynthesis, which lived about 3.3 billion to 3.5 billion years ago. This was the oldest known fossil at the time. However, Martin Brasier and his team from University of Oxford discredited the fossils as "secondary artefacts formed from amorphous graphite" in 2002. Brasier himself found a much older (~3.5 billion years old) fossil from the same region in 2011.
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