Raymond Arthur Dart (4 February 1893 – 22 November 1988) was an Australian anatomist and anthropologist, best known for his involvement in the 1924 discovery of the first fossil found of Australopithecus africanus, an extinct hominin closely related to humans, at Taung in the North of South Africa in the Northwest province.

Raymond Dart was born in Toowong, a suburb of Brisbane, Queensland, Australia, the fifth of nine children and son of a farmer and tradesman.

[4] Dart served as a captain and medic in the Australian Army in England and France during the last year of World War I.

[5] Following the war, he took up a position as a senior demonstrator at the University College, London in 1920 at the behest of Grafton Elliot Smith, famed anatomist, anthropologist and fellow Australian.

His colleague, Professor Robert Burns Young from the Buxton Limeworks, had sent Dart two crates of fossils from the small town of Taung in the North West Province of South Africa.

[8] Upon seeing the fossils, Dart immediately recognised one as being an early human because its brain dimensions were too large for a baboon or chimpanzee.

[19]Dart married Dora Tyree, a medical student from Virginia, U.S., in 1921 in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, U.S., and they divorced in 1934.

He married Marjorie Frew, head librarian at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa in 1936 and they had two children.

She brought to his attention the existence of a fossilised baboon skull at the house of Edwin Gilbert Izod, director of the Northern Lime Company and proprietor of a quarry in Taung.

At the age of 73, Dart began dividing his time between South Africa and The Institutes for the Achievement of Human Potential (IAHP), an organisation founded by Glenn Doman that treats brain injured children.