American Museum of Natural History Research Library
author: American Museum of Natural History

MacPhee, R. D. E.
Chairman and Curator
Ross MacPhee is a Curator at the American Museum of Natural History, Department of Mammalogy, Division of Vertebrate Zoology and Professor, Richard Gilder Graduate School. MacPhee’s leading interests are paleobiogeography, extinction, and cranial developmental cranial morphology. With regard to paleobiogeography, he has worked on questions related to the mammalian and general vertebrate diversity of the West Indies, Madagascar, and, most recently, Antarctica, across time intervals from late Mesozoic to late Neogene. MacPhee also studies recent mammalian extinctions, concentrating on the loss of megafaunal species during the end-Pleistocene in North America and northern Asia. His research and that of his colleagues seeks to clarify the causal patterns behind these losses, most recently by studying population dynamics of fossil species using ancient DNA methods. The purpose of cranial developmental morphology is to explore the ontogenetic background of various character states expressed in adult forms. Most of his work involves interpretation of late fetal and adult stages of placentals, with increasing emphasis on micro-CT scanning as an aid to visualization. (source: AMNH website 2015)