James William Schopf (born September 27, 1941) is an American paleobiologist and professor of earth sciences at the University of California Los Angeles.
He is the first to discover Precambrian microfossils in stromatolitic sediments of Australia (1965), South Africa (1966), Russia (1977), India (1978), and China (1984).
He was immediately appointed to the faculty of the University of California Los Angeles as Assistant Professor of Paleobiology.
[8][9][10][11] In 1987, with Bonnie M. Packer, he reported the discovery of microfossils from the Early Archean Apex Basalt and Towers Formation of northwestern Western Australia.
However, Martin Brasier and his team from University of Oxford sought to discredit the fossils as "secondary artefacts formed from amorphous graphite" in 2002.
[3] He is elected member of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics in 1973, Board of Trustees of UCLA Foundation in 1983, Molecular Biology Institute in 1991, of the US National Academy of Sciences in 1998,[17] the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Academy of Microbiology in 2011, the Linnean Society of London (as Foreign Member), elected President of the International Society for the Study of the Origin of Life, and he is the first-elected Foreign Member of the Scientific Presidium of the A.N.