Even though she was born in Germany, Elizabeth Vrba lived in Namibia from the age of 2. She studied mathematical statistics and zoology at the University of Cape Town, where she also began investigating the fossil record of antelopes and other bovids. She was the Director at theTransvaal Museum in Pretoria and later joined Yale University as professor in Paleontology.
Vrba was a major advocate for an extension of the modern synthesis, as she highlighted that macroevolution is an autonomous dimension and cannot be fully extrapolated from the accumulation of small changes in gene frequencies and phenotypes. She is best known for theTurnover Pulse hypothesis – an idea suggesting that times of extreme climate andenvironmental change lead to episodes of major turnover resulting from the coordinated extinction, speciation, and range shifts across different lineages. This controversial idea was motivated by punctuated equilibrium and defied the established notion of gradual, continuousbiotic change. This idea prompted many paleontologists to test for turnover pulses in their own datasets and stimulated more analytical approaches to faunal (and floral) changes in the fossil record. She contributed to the emergence of Paleobiology as a hypothesis-testing approach tothe fossil record, at a time when few women held faculty or curatorial positions in paleontology.
Read more about Elisabeth Vrba here.
