William Diller Matthew

William Diller Matthew FRS[1] (February 19, 1871 – September 24, 1930)[2] was a vertebrate paleontologist who worked primarily on mammal fossils, although he also published a few early papers on mineralogy, petrological geology, one on botany, one on trilobites, and he described Tetraceratops insignis,[3] which was much later suggested to be the oldest known (Early Permian) therapsid.

His father was an amateur geologist and paleontologist who instilled his son with an abiding interest in the earth sciences.

[6] He was the father of Margaret Matthew Colbert, an artist, illustrator, and sculptor who specialized in visualizing extinct species.

Matthew was also well known for his deeply influential 1915 article "Climate and evolution",[8] Matthews theory was that climate change was how organisms came to live where we find them today in opposition to the theory of continental drift.

He believed that humans and many other groups of modern mammals first evolved in the northern areas of the globe, especially central Asia because of the shifting climatic circumstances; Matthew firmly placed hominid origins in central Asia as he thought that the high plateau of Tibet was the forcing ground of mammalian evolution.