Chris Beard

Dr. Chris Beard received his bachelor’s degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he majored in zoology and anthropology. He received his Ph.D. from the Functional Anatomy and Evolution Program at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland. He has served the Carnegie Museum of Natural History as a curator of vertebrate paleontology since 1989. Beard has either led or participated in expeditions to various parts of the globe including China, Myanmar, Indonesia, Kenya, France, Canada and the American West. Among his more noteworthy discoveries is Eosimias, a 45 million year old fossil primate from China that is the oldest and most primitive known relative of monkeys, apes and humans. In recognition of his work illuminating our distant ancestry, Chris was selected as a MacArthur Fellow by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in 2000. Chris’s popular book The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes and Humans was published by the University of California Press in late 2004.