Norman Dennis Newell (January 27, 1909 – April 18, 2005) was a professor of geology at Columbia University, and chairman and curator of invertebrate paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
[3] Newell's father, a dentist, died when he was 13, but had encouraged his early interest in geology from a young age, often taking him to fossil deposits in Kansas, and at Raymond Moore's suggestion, the Florissant Formation in Colorado.
[3] His doctoral research on bivalve mollusks led to the publication of Late Paleozoic Pelecypods: Petinacea, which became a seminal text for introducing zoological concepts to the discipline of invertebrate paleontology.
[3][4] In 1945, he began teaching geology and paleontology at Columbia University, where he would train future paleontologists Stephen Jay Gould, Niles Eldredge, Steven M. Stanley, Alan Cheetham, Alfred Fischer, and Don Boyd.
[6] Stephen Jay Gould remarked, "The work of graduate students is part of a mentor's reputation forever, because we trace intellectual lineages in this manner.
[3] An important part of Newell's research was the study of mass extinctions on the history of life, publishing on the topic well before the Alvarez hypothesis made such theorizing respectable.
In the 1980s, Newell wrote on more publicly contentious topics, including a book in defense of Darwinian evolution over creationism and a paper in Palaios attributing mass extinctions to human-driven climate change.