Ed Colbert
Paleontologist Dr. Edwin (Ned) Colbert was MNA’s Honorary Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology from 1970 to 2001. Prior to that time, he was a Professor of Geology at Columbia University, Curator of Fossil Reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and an MNA Research Associate for two decades.
Internationally admired for his decades of work, he is credited with popularizing dinosaurs for today’s audience with his superb writing skills and his high level of productivity (over 400 books and articles). In 1969, Dr. Colbert and MNA’s Curator of Geology William J. Breed, secured a critical piece of evidence from Antarctica that would support the theory that Earth’s continents drift. He received an MNA Outstanding Alumni award in 1995.
His wife, Margaret, was known for her artistic depictions of dinosaurs in his publications and for her magnificent murals painted for the Petrified Forest National Park, New Mexico Museum of Natural History, and Ghost Ranch, New Mexico, as well as for her weaving skills. MNA established the Edwin H. Colbert Chair in Vertebrate Paleontology to honor this exceptional scientist, another scholar who “retired” to MNA to continue research.
Camp, Charles L., Edwin H. Colbert, Edwin D. McKee, and S. P. Welles. “A guide to the continental Triassic of northern Arizona.” Plateau, vol. 20, no. 1, 1947.
—. “Arizona and Antarctica.” Plateau, vol. 42, no. 4, 1970.
—. “The beginning of the age of dinosaurs in northern Arizona.” Plateau, vol. 22, no. 3, 1950.
—. “Dinosaurs of the Colorado Plateau.” Plateau, vol. 54, no. 2-3, 1983.
—. A primitive ornithischian dinosaur from the Kayenta formation of Arizona. Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 53, 1981.
—. The Triassic dinosaur Coelophysis. Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 57, 1989.
—. “Vertebrates from the Chinle formation.” Investigations in the Triassic Chinle formation, edited by Carol S. Breed and William J. Breed, Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 47, 1972.
Colbert, Edwin H. and R. Roy Johnson, editors. The Petrified Forest through the ages. Museum of Northern Arizona Bulletin 54, 1985.