Mary Dawson is an acclaimed paleontologist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, one of the largest of its kind in the world. She serves as curator emeritus of vertebrate paleontology and as an adjunct professor in the Department of Geology and Planetary Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. Most of her research materials are fossils she has collected worldwide, with emphasis on Arctic regions and eastern Asia. Dawson received her doctorate in paleontology from the Department of Zoology (now part of the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) at KU in 1957, a time when few women received doctoral degrees in any subject, especially paleontology.  

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