Jon Kalb

[4] He then joined a team of geologists with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in northwest Colombia mapping a potential route for a sea-level canal,[5] which led him to prospect for gold on the Guinean Shield for the Guyana Geological Survey.

[11] Kalb was later director of the Ethiopia-based mission that pioneered explorations in the Middle Awash, revealing some of the most prolific deposits bearing early hominin fossils and artifacts in the world.

[15] From the Middle Awash site Kalb and Assefa Mebrate described the most complete known record of ancestral elephants (18 species) from a single area,[16] which fauna serve as an analog to other equally diverse faunal groups recovered from the region, including hominids and the earliest hominins.

[19] After Kalb established a model-training program for Ethiopian students, and the first paleobiology research laboratory in the country, he was expelled from Ethiopia in mid-1978 amid fabricated allegations he spied for the CIA.

[23] Following more trips to Africa—joining teams with the USGS, Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Vienna—Kalb renewed surveys for Eocene mammals begun in the 1930s along the remote borderlands of West Texas.