1. Raymond Arthur Dart was an Australian anatomist and anthropologist, best known for his involvement in the 1924 discovery of the first fossil found of Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominin closely related to humans, at Taung in the North of South Africa in the Northwest province.
Raymond Dart was born in Toowong, a suburb of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the fifth of nine children and son of a farmer and tradesman.
Raymond Dart's birth occurred during the 1893 flood, which filled his parents' home and shop in Toowong.
The young Dart attended Toowong State School, Blenheim State School and earned a scholarship to Ipswich Grammar School from 1906 to 1909.
Raymond Dart considered becoming a medical missionary to China and wished to study medicine at the University of Sydney, but his father argued that he should accept the scholarship he won to the newly established University of Queensland and study science.
Raymond Dart became the first student to graduate with honours from the University of Queensland in 1914 and took his MSc with honours from UQ in 1916.
In 1924, Raymond Dart discovered the first Australopithecus africanus fossil, an extinct hominin closely related to humans.
Raymond Dart's theories were popularised by playwright, screenwriter, and science writer Robert Ardrey, first in an article published in The Reporter and reprinted in Science Digest, and later in Ardrey's influential four-book Nature of Man Series, which began in 1961 with African Genesis.
Raymond Dart's work was clearly influenced by the mentors he worked with in his early career, in particular Grafton Elliot Smith.
Raymond Dart proposed the idea of dual evolutionary origins of the neocortex.
Raymond Dart was able to identify a primordial neocortex, the oldest structure that can be considered as a neocortex, in a reptile.
Raymond Dart identified a distinction between the cytoarchitecture in an area that split it into a para-hippocampal and a para-pyriform region.
Raymond Dart married Dora Tyree, a medical student from Virginia, US, in 1921 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, US, and they divorced in 1934.
Raymond Dart brought to his attention the existence of a fossilised baboon skull at the house of Edwin Gilbert Izod, director of the Northern Lime Company and proprietor of a quarry in Taung.
In bringing the skull to show Raymond Dart, she set in motion a chain of events that led to the discovery of the "child skull of Taung".
At the age of 73, Raymond Dart began dividing his time between South Africa and The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential, an organisation founded by Glenn Doman that treats brain injured children.
Raymond Dart spent much of the next twenty years working with the IAHP.