Philip John Currie (born March 13, 1949) is a Canadian palaeontologist and museum curator who helped found the Royal Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology in Drumheller, Alberta and is now a professor at the University of Alberta in Edmonton. In the 1980s, he became the director of the Canada-China Dinosaur Project, the first cooperative palaeontological partnering between China and the West since the Central Asiatic Expeditions in the 1920s, and helped describe some of the first feathered dinosaurs. He is one of the primary editors of the influential Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs, and his areas of expertise include theropods (especially Tyrannosauridae), the origin of birds, and dinosaurian migration patterns and herding behavior. He was one of the models for palaeontologist Alan Grant in the film Jurassic Park.
Biography Currie received his Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Toronto in 1972, a Master of Science degree from McGill University in 1975, and a Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) degree in biology (with distinction) from the same institution in 1981. His master's and PhD theses were on synapsids and early aquatic diapsids respectively. Currie became curator of earth science at the Provincial Museum of Alberta in Edmonton in 1976 just as he began the PhD program. Within three seasons he had so much success at fieldwork that the province began planning a larger museum to hold the collection. The collection became part of the Tyrrell Museum of Palaeontology, which was completed in 1985, and Currie was appointed curator of dinosaurs. In 1986, Currie became the co-director of the joint Canada-China Dinosaur Project, with Dale Russell of the Canadian Museum of Nature in Ottawa and Dong Zhiming of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing.
Contributions to palaeontology Over the last 3 decades, Currie has worked on fossil discovery in Mongolia, Argentina, Antarctica, Dinosaur Provincial Park, Dry Island Buffalo Jump Provincial Park, and many other locations. His contributions to palaeontology include synonymising the genera Troodon and Stenonychosaurus in 1987 (with the former name taking precedence) and later reversing this in 2017. He has also synonymised the ceratopsian taxon Rubeosaurus with Styracosaurus, the latter being the valid, senior synonym.
Bird-dinosaur link One of Currie's main interests has been the evolutionary link between modern birds and non-avian dinosaurs. The similarities between troodontids and birds in particular made him a major proponent of the theory that birds are descended from dinosaurs, as did his finding that tyrannosaurids, along with many other non-avian theropod lineages, possessed furculae, a trait previously believed to be exclusive to birds and absent from non-avian dinosaurs. As part of the joint China-Canada Dinosaur Project, he helped describe two of the first dinosaur specimens from the lagerstätten of the Liaoning in China that clearly showed feather impressions: Protarchaeopteryx and Caudipteryx. In contrast with the 1996 discovery of Sinosauropteryx, which only showed the impression of downy filaments, these were indisputably feathers. This not only helped cement the theory that birds are descended from dinosaurs, but indicated that many dromaeosaurids were feathered. He was later featured in numerous popular articles and documentaries.
Archaeoraptor hoax Currie was involved in exposing a composite specimen that had been the subject of the 1999 National Geographic "Archeoraptor" scandal.
Dinosaur behaviour Currie became increasingly sceptical of the orthodox belief that large carnivorous dinosaurs were solitary animals, but there was no evidence for his hypothesis that they may have hunted in packs. However, circumstantial evidence came when he tracked down a site mentioned by Barnum Brown that featured 12 specimens of Albertosaurus from various age groups. Currie was also involved in the discovery of a bonebed which evidenced gregarious behaviour in the caenagnathoid Avimimus. In 2023, Currie co-authored a paper describing evidence from the Danek Bonebed that Albertosaurus engaged in cannibalism.
Phylogenetics Currie has made important contributions to the study of phylogenetics. He contributed to a comprehensive revision of the phylogenetic relationships of ankylosaurid species in 2015. He also reassessed the phylogenetic status of Nipponosaurus sachalinensis, discovering that it was much more basal among the Lambeosaurinae than palaeontologists had previously thought. In 2022, he participated in a study that found Dineobellator to represent a novel dromaeosaurid outside any known clade of eudromaeosaurs.
Dinosaur anatomy Currie has published multiple papers on the cranial anatomy of various dinosaurs. Together with Rodolfo Coria, he published a detailed description of the braincase of the large carcharodontosaurid Giganotosaurus carolinii in 2003, which led him to believe that Giganotosaurus and Carcharodontosaurus were very closely related genera. In 2017, he and Ariana Paulina-Carabajal wrote a paper on the anatomy of the well-preserved braincase of Murusraptor barrosaensis, finding it to be more similar to tyrannosaurids than to allosaurids or ceratosaurids. A year later, he coauthored a study detailing the endocranial morphology of the ankylosaurines Talarurus plicatospineus and Tarchia teresae. In 2019, together with David Christopher Evans, Currie described newly discovered cranial material of the dromaeosaurid Saurornitholestes langstoni and found the poorly known tooth taxon Zapsalis likely to represent the same taxon as Saurornitholestes. Currie's contributions to the study of dinosaur dentition include helping discover the first known instance of alveolar remodelling in dinosaurs and revealing in a 2020 study that the dentition of Sinraptor bore extreme similarities to that of Allosaurus, further concluding that Sinraptor would likely have actively hunted medium-sized dinosaurs such as Jiangjunosaurus junggarensis. Currie has extensively studied the subject of juvenile dinosaurs and dinosaur ontogeny. His publications on the subject have included studies on juveniles of Chasmosaurus, Pinacosaurus, Gorgosaurus, Daspletosaurus, and Saurornithoides. In 1997, Currie teamed up with Microsoft's Chief Technical Officer Nathan Myhrvold to create a computer model demonstrating that diplodocids could snap their tails like whips, and create small sonic booms.
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