K. Christopher Beard is an American paleontologist, an expert on the primate fossil record and a 2000 MacArthur Fellowship "Genius" Award Winner.
Beard is the former Curator of the Carnegie Museum of Natural History,[2] and Mary R. Dawson Chair of Vertebrate Paleontology, at University of Pittsburgh.
[3] He is currently Distinguished Foundation Professor, Senior Curator at the University of Kansas.
[1] Beard was also part of the research teams that discovered Teilhardina, the earliest primate ever found in North America, and Eosimias, one of the earliest higher primates yet discovered.
[6] Beard received his PhD from the Functional Anatomy and Evolution Program at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in 1989.