Today's Los Angeles Times had lengthy obituary for Malcolm Carnegie McKenna, whose father was a Claremont McKenna College founding trustee and whose mother was a very significant CMC donor.
The New York Times also had a piece on McKenna on March 10th, as did the San Bernardino Sun.
McKenna was a Webb School alum and for over 40 years was the head of the paleontology department at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. The LA Times obit described McKenna's career:
A specialist in the study of small mammals rather than the gigantic dinosaurs that fascinate many other paleontologists, McKenna conducted field expeditions every year at sites as varied as the western United States, Patagonia, the Andes, China, Mongolia, Greenland and the Canadian Arctic.
In 1964, at the height of the Cold War, he went to Mongolia as a tourist in an attempt to arrange a resumption in field work in the Gobi Desert -- a site that had been initially explored by the New York museum's Roy Chapman Andrews in the 1920s.
When permission was finally granted in 1990, McKenna was able to fulfill his lifelong dream of exploring the region.
"I used to memorize the names of towns and trade routes," he told the New York Times. Since his childhood, "I've wanted to get out here and do something in this part of the world."
That first expedition discovered, among other things, a species related to the Komodo dragon.
In the 1960s, McKenna was a strong proponent of a then-new way of classifying animal relationships called cladistics. Cladistics relies on evolutionary biology to define links between species rather than the older technique of noting physical similarities.
Those cladistic relationships were at the heart of his massive 1997 book, "Classification of Mammals Above the Species Level," co-written with Susan K. Bell of the museum. The book was the successor to a similar tome written in 1945 by George Gaylord Simpson, his predecessor at the museum.
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