1. Joseph Mellick Leidy was an American paleontologist, parasitologist and anatomist.
21 Facts About Joseph Leidy
1. 2.
Joseph Leidy was born on September 9,1823, to an established Philadelphia family of Pennsylvania Germans.
3.
Joseph Leidy's father, Philip, was a hatter; his mother, Catharine, died during childbirth when he was young.
4.
Joseph Leidy married Anna Harden, a woman who took a serious interest in his work and helped him with it on occasion.
5.
Joseph Leidy named the holotype specimen of Hadrosaurus foulkii, which was recovered from the marl pits of Haddonfield, New Jersey.
6.
Joseph Leidy concluded, contrary to the view prevailing at the time, that this dinosaur could adopt a bipedal posture.
7.
Marsh claimed Joseph Leidy contributed to the falling out of the two by showing Cope in the presence of Marsh that Cope had mistakenly placed the head of a fossil Elasmosaurus on the tail, rather than on the neck, and then publishing a correction.
8.
Joseph Leidy was an early American supporter of Darwin's theory of evolution, and lobbied successfully for Darwin's election to membership in the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
9.
In 1852, Joseph Leidy referred Bison antiquus, the North American fossil bison, to the genus Bison, the first to do so.
10.
In 1855, Joseph Leidy published an influential memoir on fossil ground sloths of North America, the first comprehensive study of North American xenarthrans.
11.
Joseph Leidy dominated vertebrate paleontology research in Florida during the latter half of the 19th century.
12.
Joseph Leidy described and published the newly discovered species Smilodon floridanus.
13.
Similarly, the body didn't have teeth, so Joseph Leidy thought the woman had died in middle or old age; however, a new set of X-rays in 2007 suggested that the woman had died in her late 20s.
14.
Joseph Leidy held this position while remaining curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences and professor at Penn.
15.
Joseph Leidy formed the institute's professional journal "Transactions of the Wagner Free Institute of Science" and sponsored expeditions to collect specimens.
16.
Joseph Leidy led a large renovation to the building and dramatically reorganized the collection.
17.
Joseph Leidy was a renowned parasitologist, and determined as early as 1846 that trichinosis was caused by a parasite in undercooked meat.
18.
Joseph Leidy collected gems as well as fossils, and donated his important collection of the former to the Smithsonian before he died.
19.
Joseph Leidy served as a surgeon to Satterlee Military Hospital in Philadelphia during the American Civil War.
20.
Joseph Leidy was elected as the founding president of the Association of American Anatomists in 1888.
21.
In 1846, Joseph Leidy became the first person to use a microscope to solve a murder mystery.