Philip John Currie
| Philip John Currie | |
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| Born |
March 13, 1949 Brampton, Ontario |
| Residence | Edmonton, Alberta |
| Citizenship | Canadian |
| Fields | Paleontology |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | The osteology and relationships of aquatic eosuchians from the Upper Permian of Africa and Madagascar (1981) |
| Doctoral advisor | Robert L. Carroll |
| Known for | Dinosaurs |
| Spouse | Eva Koppelhus |
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Website uofa |
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Philip John Currie, FRSC AOE (born March 13, 1949) is a Canadian palaeontologist and museum curator who helped found the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta and is now a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. In the 1980s he became the director of the Canada-China Dinosaur Project, the first cooperative palaeontological partnering between China and the West since the Central Asiatic Expeditions in the 1920s, and helped describe some of the first feathered dinosaurs. He is one of the primary editors of the influential Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, and his areas of expertise include theropods (especially Tyrannosauridae), the origin of birds, and dinosaurian migration patterns and herding behavior. He was one of the models for palaeontologist Alan Grant in the film Jurassic Park.
Currie received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Toronto in 1972, a Master of Science from McGill University in 1975, and a Ph.D. in biology (with distinction) from the same institution in 1981. His Masters thesis and Ph.D. thesis were on synapsids and early aquatic diapsids respectively.
Currie became curator of earth sciences at the Provincial Museum of Alberta (which became the Royal Alberta Museum in 2005) in Edmonton in 1976 just as he began the Ph.D. program. Within three seasons he had so much success at fieldwork that the province began planning a larger museum to hold the collection. The collection became part of the Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, which was completed in 1985 (the "Royal" epithet was added in 1990), and Currie was appointed curator of dinosaurs.
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