20 December 2024

Researchers agree that much of the knowledge gathered about dinosaurs, as well as the origin and early evolution of mammals, comes from the work of Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska. During the Polish-Mongolian expeditions she led between 1963-1971 in the Gobi Desert, her team discovered 20 species of dinosaurs, including the skeleton of a 6-meter Gallimimus, which even “starred” a few decades later in Steven Spielberg’s film Jurassic Park.

In 2025, we will celebrate both the 100th anniversary of this remarkable paleontologist’s birth and the 10th anniversary of her passing.

Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska, 1965, on excavations in Altan Ula, autobiography

Expeditions to the Gobi Desert

The greatest scientific discoveries by Professor Kielan-Jaworowska and her team occurred in the Gobi Desert during eight Polish-Mongolian expeditions led by her from 1963 to 1971.

Organising research in this remote location in the 1960s posed enormous challenges due to the extremely harsh climate, Cold War political tensions, and the limited financial and technological resources available in Poland.

Despite these obstacles, Kielan-Jaworowska turned out a great organiser determined to ensure that her more than 20-person team had the necessary equipment and supplies to remain in the field for three months, transporting everything over the distance of 5,700 kilometers to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia’s capital, before each research season.

Groundbreaking discoveries

The Polish-Mongolian expeditions uncovered many spectacular Late Cretaceous vertebrate fossils (dated to around 80–75 million years ago) in the Nemegt Basin, including 20 species of dinosaurs as well as fossils of crocodiles, lizards, turtles, and birds.

One of the key discoveries was a rock containing mammalian remains in the same layer as a dinosaur tooth and fossilised dinosaur eggs, which led to the hypothesis that placental mammals coexisted with dinosaurs.

Among other important discoveries were the famous “fighting dinosaurs”a – Velociraptor and Protoceratops that likely died rapidly during a struggle – and the unique forelimbs of Deinocheirus.

Only by 1965, Kielan-Jaworowska’s team had sent over 20 tons of fossils to Poland, greatly enriching scientific collections and advancing research. During the last expedition, they counted over 180 skulls belonging to then little-studied Mesozoic mammals. This was the largest collection of such artifacts in the world.

Among the Mesozoic mammal fossils were multituberculates – an extinct species of herbivorous mammals, whose study brought Professor Kielan-Jaworowska international acclaim. Based on her research, she concluded that they must have been viviparous, or live-bearing. She also created a model of the brains of these mesozoic mammals, estimating their intelligence levels and even determining that some of them were venomous.

As her research advanced, Kielan-Jaworowska overcame Cold War political obstacles to establish collaborations with leading Western scientists, particularly in the United Kingdom, France, and the United States. She built a scientific network centred in Warsaw, connecting to research programmes across the globe.

International popularity

Prof. Kielan-Jaworowska authored over 230 scientific articles and books, publishing her work in both Polish and international journals. Her first paper in Nature appeared in 1969, and her book Hunting for Dinosaurs, published in English in 1970 by MIT Press, became a popular science bestseller in the United States (making it one of the first science books translated from Polish to English to achieve such spectacular success abroad).

From 1960 to 1982, she was Director of the Institute of Paleobiology at the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN), and after stepping down, she accepted a two-year position as Visiting Professor at the National Museum of Natural History in Paris.

At the age of 68, she served as a consultant for Steven Spielberg during the making of Jurassic Park, and at 70, she took on the role of Head of the Department of Palaeontology at the University of Oslo. At 79, she co-authored Mammals from the Age of Dinosaurs, a book that remains one of the field’s key texts to this day.

The war-torn youth

Born on 25 November 1925 in Sokołów Podlaski, Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska grew up in Eastern Europe amidst the devastation of World War II. Under German occupation, higher education was banned and punishable by death, yet she pursued clandestine studies at the University of Warsaw. At just 15, she joined the Polish resistance, serving as a medic until the 1944 Warsaw Uprising and the city’s destruction by retreating German forces.

After the war, she completed her master’s degree in 1949 and earned her doctorate at the University of Warsaw in 1952. She had always dreamed of studying fossils that documented human evolution, but such discoveries were not available in Poland. Thus, her early research focused on trilobites and polychaete marine fossils from the Palaeozoic era (around 541 to 252 million years ago).

In total, Zofia Kielan-Jaworowska dedicated 12 years to studying trilobites. Traveling to the Soviet Union, Denmark, Czechoslovakia, and Norway, she collected several thousand specimens.

In 1961, Kielan-Jaworowska’s exceptional research and leadership skills earned her the role of director of the prestigious Institute of Paleobiology in Warsaw, part of the Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) – just as PAN signed a cooperative agreement with Mongolia for – the later groundbreaking – palaeontological expeditions.

Legacy

“Zofia spurred everyone to do their best. She was a peerless role model. Apart from her intellectual prowess, she will be remembered most for her indomitable spirit. Her style was, at times, unapologetically exacting –  an apprenticeship with her was akin to martial-arts training with a Buddhist monk –  but she pushed the rest of us to reach for better science,” wrote Richard L. Cifelli, Zofia’s long-term collaborator and curator of vertebrate palaeontology at the Sam Noble Museum in Oklahoma.

Kielan-Jaworowska received many prestigious awards, including the Romer-Simpson Medal in 1996, the highest honour granted by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology for “sustained and outstanding excellence in scientific research and contribution to vertebrate palaeontology.” In 1999, she was also awarded the title of Righteous Among the Nations for her aid to Jews during World War II.

In her honour, several discovered fossil animals were named, including species such as Kielanodon, Kielantherium, Zofiabaatar or Zofiagale.

Credit: Instytut Paleobiologii Polskiej Akademii Nauk

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