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Paleontologist, professor
World renown paleontologist Malcolm Carnegie McKenna, son of Donald McKenna, a founding trustee of Claremont McKenna College, died on March 3, 2008 in Boulder, Colorado. He was 77.
Described as “one of the most respected paleontologists of the 20th century,” by Don Lofgren, 17-year director of the Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology at The Webb School, Mr. McKenna’s tireless quest for uncovering secrets about the past took him around the globe. Locally, he served on the paleontology museum’s board since its inception in 1979 until his death.
“His close association with [Webb School] gave it scientific legitimacy,” Mr. Lofgren said. “With him on the board, the museum gained instant recognition. When you think of the Alf Museum, you think first of the founder, Raymond Alf, of course, but the second is certainly Malcolm McKenna.”
Born in Pomona in 1930, Mr. McKenna grew up in Claremont where he attended The Webb School. As a child, his imagination was fired by H. Rider Haggard’s adventure tales and he taught himself electronics, physics, astronomy, chemistry and metallurgy, which had been his family’s business for generations. As a teenager in 1945, he built a homemade television set using a World War II surplus radar tube. He was also a ham radio enthusiast.
As a young student at Webb, he was inspired by Raymond Alf to become a paleontologist and, at age 17, he discovered his first fossil Titanothere skull, nicknamed, “Betsy,” in Nebraska. Following graduation from Webb, he attended Caltech and Pomona Colleges, eventually receiving his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His wife of 55 years, Priscilla McKenna, also graduated from Pomona College, as did both of Mr. McKenna’s parents.
The author of hundreds of research papers, Mr. McKenna specialized in the history of mammalian evolution, but also published interdisciplinary work in cosmology, astrophysics, geology and molecular biology. He delighted most in interdisciplinary studies and exhorted his students and colleagues to synthesize knowledge as much as specialize in it.
“He was one of the great minds in science,” Mr. Lofgren commented. “He was a paleontologist, but he could integrate all sorts of different fields in his work.”
Mr. McKenna’s life work was a massive mammal classification project based on a new classification paradigm called cladistics, which was introduced in the 60s. The monumental research undertaking, titled Classification of Mammals Above the Species Level, was published in both book and database form. This work succeeded the 1945 scientific classification of G.G. Simpson, his predecessor in the role of Frick curator of vertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he spent 41 years of his illustrious career.
Referring to the breadth and scope of this classification project, Mr. Lofgren remarked, “No one else would be crazy enough to do that. It’s so complex.”
After retiring from the American Museum of Natural History, Mr. McKenna held positions at the University of Colorado and the University of Wyoming. He was also a professor emeritus of geological sciences at Columbia University. He taught and mentored over 30 PhD students in paleontology.
A Fellow of the New York Explorer’s Club, Mr. McKenna organized annual museum field expeditions to the western United States, Patagonia, the Andes, China, Mongolia, Greenland and the Canadian Arctic. In his later years, he traveled the world giving lectures on earth history and the fossil and biological evidence of evolution.
In 1964, at the height of the Cold War, he visited Mongolia as a tourist, which ultimately resulted in the resumption of fieldwork in the Gobi Desert initiated by the American Museum’s expeditions of the 1920s. Mr. McKenna’s rejuvenation of Mongolian fieldwork was historic as it had been over 6 decades since the country had allowed western scientists to conduct such studies. While in the Gobi Desert, he and his colleagues discovered a new species related to the Komodo dragon as well as a multitude of remarkable fossil discoveries.
“The best times he had were in the field with his peers,” said his son, Andrew McKenna.
As an active private pilot in the 1950s, Mr. McKenna would often do fieldwork from the air, navigating the western United States solely by geologic features. From 1967 to 1975, he was an avid runner of rivers in the Colorado River basin, participating in a 100th anniversary John Wesley Powell expedition in 1969. Twice, he rowed a wooden boat through the Grand Canyon in the early 1970s. He had a prodigious cartographic memory and was an expert on the geology and fossil beds in the western US, especially in Wyoming where he would often land his Cessna on remote dirt roads.
“He just loved to camp and search for fossils and discover new things,” Mr. Lofgren said. “He was always trying to find out more about the past. That was his passion. He was very inspiring to everyone who met him.”
While traveling in the Arctic in the summer of 2000, Mr. McKenna and his wife took pictures of the North Pole’s lack of sea ice. The pictures were prominently featured on the New York Times’ front page, on the David Letterman Show, in Time magazine and elsewhere, bringing the issue of global warning to wider attention.
In addition to his scientific activities, Mr. McKenna was a board member of numerous educational institutions including the Flat Rock Brook Nature Center, the Elizabeth Morrow School and Dwight-Englewood Schools in New Jersey, the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff and the Lemur Conservation Foundation in Florida.
In 2003, Mr. McKenna was awarded the Romer-Simpson Prize of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontologists and, in 1992, the Gold Medal of the Paleontological Society of America, the top honors in his profession.
Never one to pass up a little mischief or to tweak authority, Mr. McKenna loved off-color limericks and practical jokes, such as electrifying a toilet seat, building an unauthorized telephone line or funding an underground high school newspaper. Several years ago, he attended a public meeting at the Museum of Northern Arizona in disguise to help demonstrate that official deception was in the works.
“I think he had a pretty good sense of humor,” said his son.
Mr. McKenna’s great-grandmother, Anna Hogan McKenna, was a cousin of Andrew Carnegie.
Mr. McKenna is survived by his wife, Priscilla McKenna of Boulder, Colorado; by his children and their spouses, Douglas McKenna and Judith Houlding of Boulder, Colorado, Andrew and Jacquie McKenna also of Boulder, Colorado; Katharine McKenna and Mark Braunstein of Woodstock, New York and Bruce and Maureen McKenna of Santa Fe, New Mexico; and by his nine grandchildren, Caitlin, Alison, Madeleine, Ian, Conor, Eliza, Dónal, Alexandra and Juliana McKenna.
A memorial for Mr. McKenna is pending.
Memorial contributions may be made to The Malcolm C. McKenna Goler Research Fund, Raymond M. Alf Museum of Paleontology, 1175 W. Baseline Rd., Claremont, CA 91711.
