José Bonaparte
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Through Napoleon, Fossil and Occam's razor
Biography
Bonaparte was the son of an Italian sailor, with no close connection to Napoleon's House of Bonaparte. He was born in Rosario, Santa Fe, Argentina, and grew up in Mercedes, Buenos Aires. Despite a lack of formal training in paleontology, he started collecting fossils with many friends at an early age, and created a museum in their home town. He later became the curator of the National University of Tucumán, where he was named Doctor honoris causa in 1976, and then in the late 1970s became a senior scientist at the Museo Argentino de Ciencias Naturales in Buenos Aires. Bonaparte was a two-time Guggenheim Fellow and since the 1970s received periodic funding from the National Geographic Society. He was reportedly hard-working, stubborn, and had a strong personality, even violent. He received another honorary degree from the National University of Comahue in 2011. Bonaparte died at dawn in his sleep on 18 February 2020 at age 91.
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Career
Discovery of southern diversity
Between 1975 and 1977, Bonaparte worked on excavation of Saltasaurus with Martín Vince and Juan C. Leal at the estancia "El Brete." With fellow Argentine Jaime Powell, Bonaparte studied Saltasaurus and suggested that in life, it was covered in armored plates known as osteoderms. Based on this discovery, together with twenty specimens of Kritosaurus australis and a lambeosaurine dinosaur found in South America, Bonaparte hypothesized that there had been a large-scale migration of species between the Americas at the end of the Mesozoic period. Bonaparte was also the first to propose the clade abelisauridae, a grouping of ceratosaurians that were the dominant carnivores during the Cretaceous in Gondwana.
The supercontinent of Pangea split into Laurasia in the north and Gondwana in the south during the Jurassic. During the Cretaceous, South America pulled away from the rest of Gondwana. The division caused a divergence between the northern biota and the southern biota, and the southern animals appear strange to those used to the more northerly fauna. Bonaparte's finds illustrate this divergence, and caused paleontologist Robert Bakker to dub him the "Master of the Mesozoic."
Discoveries
Bonaparte described a wide array of dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, including:
- Abelisaurus comahuensis (1985)
- Agustinia ligabuei (1998)
- Alvarezsaurus calvoi (1991)
- Amargasaurus cazaui (1991)
- Andesaurus delgadoi (1991)
- Argentinosaurus huinculensis (1993)
- Argyrosaurus superbus (1984)
- Carnotaurus sastrei (1985),
- Coloradisaurus brevis (1978)
- Guaibasaurus candelariensis (1998)
- Kritosaurus australis (1984)
- Lapparentosaurus madagascariensis (1986)
- Ligabueino andesi (1996)
- Mussaurus patagonicus (1979)
- Noasaurus leali (1980)
- Piatnitzkysaurus floresi (1979)
- Rayososaurus agrioensis (1996)
- Riograndia guaibensis (2001)
- Riojasaurus incertus (1969)
- Saltasaurus loricatus (1980)
- Velocisaurus unicus (1991)
- Volkheimeria chubutensis (1979)
- Ligabuesaurus leanzai (2006)
He also contributed to the description of Giganotosaurus.
Philosophy
Bonaparte was a traditionalist and did not use modern cladistic methods, which apply the principle of parsimony to a vast array of synapomorphies. Partly for this reason, he declined to work on the modern treatise The Dinosauria, published in 1990. However, in 2000 Bonaparte began to use cladograms. For instance, his studies of sauropods (e.g., Ligabuesaurus) and proto-mammals from Brazil show cladograms made by himself and co-authors. While he is best known for his dinosaur discoveries, he preferred to study the fossils of mammals.
His students included Rodolfo Coria, Luis Chiappe, Fernando Novas, Jaime Powell, Guillermo W. Rougier, Leonardo Salgado, Jorge Calvo, Sebastián Apesteguía and Agustín Martinelli.