What can we understand about a brain when that brain has long since disappeared? Johanna Gabriela Ottilie “Tilly” Edinger, a Jewish paleontologist, used fossilized skulls to study brain evolution. This research allowed him to escape Nazi Germany in 1939 and to create a new subdivision of paleontology: paleoneurology.
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Elah Feder: In November 1938, it was final. Tilly Edinger would not be allowed to return to work or even enter the building. She had spent more than 15 years researching and caring for fossils at the Senckenberg Museum in Frankfurt. Now she has been banned.
Tilly would have seen this coming. Over the previous five years, the Nazi government had gradually moved closer to the Jews. Jews were expelled from schools, stripped of their citizenship, and barred from working in public institutions. But Tilly continued to come to work. Technically, the Senckenberg was not a public institution. It was private and, technically, even though she was a respected paleontologist, Tilly was a volunteer there.
They didn’t pay her. However, to be even safer, she had tried to keep a low profile. She no longer attended lectures, slipped through side doors, and the museum, for its part, did its best to protect her.
Émilie Buchholtz: They found ways to let it continue as long as they could.
Elah Feder: Emily Buchholtz is a vertebrate paleontologist and professor emeritus at Wellesley College.
Émilie Buchholtz: But at some point it became really difficult because she was no longer allowed to referee articles. She was not allowed to translate for money. She wasn’t, you know, the ways in which she was a part of her community were becoming more and more restricted little by little.
Elah Feder: And then, on November 9, 1938, the night that would become known as KristallNacht, the Nazis burned and vandalized synagogues and Jewish businesses across the country.
Later, in Frankfurt, Tilly wrote of walking the streets with broken glass crunching under her feet. She saw around her, no police officers, only smiling faces.
There could no longer be any semblance of normal life.
Émilie Buchholtz: She stayed too late. People had been telling him for years: go away
Elah Feder: But if Tilly was worried, she didn’t show it much. She wrote in a letter that somehow the fossils would save her.
And it turns out Tilly was right.
Elah Feder: It’s Lost Women of Science. My name is Elah Feder and I am joined by…
Katie Hafner: Katie Hafner, host and co-executive producer of Lost Women of Science.
Elah Feder: Today, the story of Tilly Edinger, who was saved by her science, the science of paleoneurology. It’s a field that she actually created and, in a way, a field that poses a question that this show asks all the time: What can you know about a brain when that brain is long gone?
Katie Hafner: Elah, Tilly Edinger was Jewish in Germany in 1938, and she thought fossils would save her? How?
Elah Feder: The short answer is that she thought her scientific achievements would get her a work visa somewhere, because in the 1920s she had done something quite remarkable. She is developing a new field within paleontology: the study of the brain. And if you think about it, it’s not easy to do. Fossils generally do not have brains.
Katie Hafner: Wait, let me get this straight…let me get this straight. So study brains that have been fossilized for a long time?
Elah Feder: Well no, the brain is usually gone. Um, we’ll get into the details of how you study brains where there aren’t any. But let’s put that aside for a minute.
Katie Hafner: I know we’ll come back to all of this, but first and foremost, founding a new field of science as a woman is quite an accomplishment. So how did she get there?
Elah Feder: So, on the one hand, Tilly definitely had some downsides. She was a woman, she was Jewish. She also suffered from progressive hearing loss that began in adolescence, but she also had a key advantage.
Émilie Buchholtz: she came from a wealthy background.
Elah Feder: Emily Buchholtz again.
Émilie Buchholtz: I mean really serious money. She had had correspondence and family visits with incredibly famous people since she was very young. And so I think she was, because she was also trilingual, you know, she was just a person who was comfortable with her own position among others. She had confidence in herself.
Katie Hafner: You know, that’s one thing on this show that we encounter a lot is that the women who get an education tend to be the ones whose families have money.
Elah Feder: Yeah, it doesn’t hurt. Tilly’s money therefore came mainly from her mother’s side of the family, a prominent banking family. They had been in Frankfurt since 1397. And his mother, Anna Edinger. She was a well-known activist, particularly for women’s rights. SO. This was helpful. And then there was Tilley’s father, Ludwig Edinger, who was a scientist. A highly respected neurologist and comparative anatomist. There is a part of the brain that bears his name, the Edinger, Vestal nucleus. Do you want me to tell you what it is?
Katie Hafner: Really? I’ve never heard of that.
Elah Feder: How have you not heard of the Edinger Vestal core? So it controls some things related to your eye muscles, including the constriction of your pupils in bright light, and the thing is, it’s a big problem.
Katie Hafner: So he was doing his job in the early 1900s?
Elah Feder: Yes yes. And the end of the 18 centuries.
So Tilly grew up with an appreciation for science and a very good education. So although she was a woman, a Jewish woman in the early 20th century, she was actually very well prepared to become a scientist. She eventually went to college and in 1920 received her doctorate.
Katie Hafner: What university was it?
Elah Feder: University of Frankfurt. So, during his doctorate, something really important happened. His advisor told him to take a look at Nothosaurus. Do you know what it is?
Katie Hafner: No, I have no idea. You know what I’m going to say Elah, throughout this conversation. I’ll often say, “I have no idea what that is.”
Elah Feder: Neither Nothosaurus nor the Edinger-Westphal core? All right. Nothosaurus Marine Reptile lived during the Triassic period and vaguely resembles a crocodile. Anyway, said his advisor, how about we study the roof of this creature’s mouth? And then we leave her alone until the thesis is finished.
And if Tilly had just stuck to her mission and moved on, I don’t think we’d be talking about her today, but while she was working on this creature’s palette, she also came across an endocast.
Katie Hafner: Endocaster…
Elah Feder: An endocast is therefore a molding of the interior of the skull. You can make one by pouring plaster or latex into a skull, but it can also happen naturally, as is the case here. So, a fossil skull fills with mud, which then hardens. And what you get is a cast that’s roughly the shape of the missing brain.
Katie Hafner: Oh my God. Who knew?
Elah Feder: Not me until I did this. Yeah, no.
Elah Feder: Tilly therefore wrote her conclusions here. She described the relative sizes of the brain areas she could see. She also studied what this kind of casting can actually tell us. For example, how closely does an endocast match the original brain that was there.
Nothing really earth-shattering yet. Um, you can actually learn a lot more about mammals from their endocast than you can about reptiles. But it’s the beginning. So she published this in 1921 and graduated the following year from the University of Frankfurt.
So, at just 24 years old, Tilly Edinger was a woman with a doctorate in science in the 1920s.
Katie Hafner: What did she do with it? Did she find a job? Were there many job prospects? What happened?
Elah Feder: She began doing unpaid work. She attended her university’s Institute of Geology/Paleontology and the Senckenberg Museum, which are in the same building, and volunteered for them, which was actually not unusual for a wealthy person from Frankfurt. The museum actually relied on these wealthy volunteers.
Émilie Buchholtz: I mean, I’m sure she just said, can I come see your fossils? And they said, sure. And by the way, they are messy. If you want to clean them, do so.
Elah Feder: Perhaps the expectations were not very high at the beginning, we don’t know, but once again, Tilly Edinger was not content with her mission. She wrote, she researched, she published furiously, and within a few years she created a new field in paleo-neurology, and she laid it all out in a book she wrote during her time there,
Émilie Buchholtz: totally unfunded. You know, that’s just what she wrote to the Senckenberg just for fun.
Elah Feder: And in this book, Fossil brains (fossil brains), she took these endo-cerebral casts, which, you know, paleontologists knew about, but they existed largely as an afterthought in the field. Tilly, she brought these shows to light, look, we can actually study the brains of extinct animals. And here’s how to do it.
Katie Hafner: This is so beyond anything I could think of doing. I mean, one of the things that we do a lot at Lost Women of Science is think about where did this person get this curiosity from.
Elah Feder: I think for her we can potentially draw a straight line here because her father was a neurologist and her father died just a few years before she started her PhD. She loved her father, and after first posting on an endocast, she wrote that even though I’m a paleontologist, I can still somehow follow in Dad’s footsteps.
Katie Hafner: Oh, yeah, I understand that. I totally understand.
Elah Feder: So this is a book that would make any father proud. That really established Tilly’s name in paleontology circles, you know, way beyond Germany.
Katie Hafner: Okay, so was the book published under his name?
Elah Feder: Yeah.
Katie Hafner: What was his full name?
Elah Feder: His full name. Oh my God. All right. Let me take it out. It’s long. All right. Full name, a long German – it contained several names. Okay, so her full name is Johanna Gabriela Ottilie – so that’s where Tilly comes from – Johanna Gabriela Ottilie Edinger. However, she has always published under the name Tilly Edinger.
So this book was a really big deal. It’s not every day that you discover a new discipline. But what I personally found more interesting was some of her later work, in which she describes the evolutionary patterns she begins to see. So, for example, Sirenia is manatees and dugongs. Do you know dugongs? They are really cute.
Katie Hafner: Manatees, I know. Dugongs, no.
Elah Feder: They are fun manatees. They are related. They’re like, they’re all the same, cute chubby herbivores from the sea. And they’re ancient relatives. The Sirenia therefore evolved from land animals and then became marine inhabitants. So Tilly, she arranged their endo casts from oldest to newest.
Émilie Buchholtz: In the sequence you get more and more aquatic adaptations. And the size of the olfactory lobes decreases compared to the brain itself. If you look at an ancestral Sirenia and a more recent Sirenia, the olfactory lobes will be smaller relative to the size of the entire brain.
Elah Feder: These animals were losing their ability to sense with more time spent in water, which I think is cool because it shows that evolution isn’t just about adding new abilities, but about being efficient and letting go of what no longer helps you.
Katie Hafner: Totally fascinating, I think, why, why do we need our little toe? Won’t it eventually disappear? I mean, who needs it?
Elah Feder: I would never have thought that. I’m just doing ass-
Katie Hafner: I think about it a lot.
Elah Feder: Science must deal with it.
Okay, back to Tilly. In 1933, she published her article on Sirenia – a great scientific contribution, in my opinion. The same year, the Nazis came to power.
Fortunately for Tilly, she had by then gained an international reputation, particularly in the United States, and as she predicted, the fossils would save her, but they took their time. It’s after the break.
Katie Hafner: Elah, I find this completely fascinating. So far, it looks like she’s having a fantastic time. She had complete freedom to do her research, and then in 1933, everything began to change. RIGHT?
Elah Feder: RIGHT. Thus, in the 1930s, life for Jews gradually deteriorated. Tilly, like many other Jews at that time, stayed. She remained there after Hitler took power. She remained there until 1935 when Jews were stripped of their citizenship and, as we know, she was there for Kristallnacht in 1938.
Katie Hafner: And people, as Emily mentioned, had been begging her to come out, her sister in particular. She left for Turkey in 1933.
Katie Hafner: And she was adamant. I mean, what did she do? It’s something that I thought about, um, I wrote a whole book about Germany years and years ago. And I think probably people like Tilly considered themselves more German than Jewish. Is this your impression?
Elah Feder: Yeah, I mean, like I mentioned, she had really deep roots in Frankfurt. His family had been there since the Middle Ages. I think it’s possible that she was just very attached to the life she led. I think it’s also possible that she’s in denial, or even just fearless. She told a friend that she was not afraid of ending up in a concentration camp.
Émilie Buchholtz: She said she was wearing something that could kill her
Elah Feder: Véronal, which at the time was a brand name for Barbital, which is fatal in a certain dose.
Wojcicki But luckily she didn’t need to use it.
Elah Feder: Because Tilly was right. The fossils saved her.
Émilie Buchholtz: But barely by the skin of his teeth.
Elah Feder: It came dangerously close, but then a miracle in the form of Alfred Romer. Alfred Romer was a famous American paleontologist, and over time he found employment at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.
Émilie Buchholtz: she called him her chief angel, she, her patron angel, because he had never met her. He had of course heard about her, thanks to the book she had written, and on that basis, he was ready to offer her a job. It wasn’t really clear what he was doing, and he had virtually no funding to do it, but he found a way for A, from Harvard, and B, to have a title and a small stipend so that it could be official.
Yes, there is a position waiting for him and on that basis. England was willing to accept him for a year before his number was revealed for entry into the United States.
Elah Feder: Tilly Edinger left Germany in May 1939. At that time, as a Jew, she was not allowed to enter museums. She was not allowed to enter cinemas and cafes. And when leaving the country, she was not allowed to take anything with her, or almost nothing. So this woman who had grown up with so much money came to Cambridge with almost nothing, but she made it.
Émilie Buchholtz: The funny thing is losing your wealth. She lost every penny, basically, she had a spoon, you know, a few dollars. But she didn’t even mind being broke, she lived. I went to see where his apartment was. It’s really, really close to the museum, and it wasn’t at all what she was used to, and she had to cook for herself and you know, she talked about it. She was like, well, I must even like making my own meals. Imagine!
People who had been invited said it was dark and a little gloomy, and I don’t think she traveled in the truck much to do the cleaning, you know?
Elah Feder: it was the only thing she hadn’t received training for.
Émilie Buchholtz: Yes. RIGHT.
Elah Feder: And oh boy, did she love her new life. Katie, have you ever seen an American fairy tale?
Katie Hafner: No, uh, uh.
Elah Feder: Okay, this is a classic from my childhood: a children’s film about the Mouskowitz family.
Katie Hafner: I already love it. Tell me,
Elah Feder: So it’s about a family of Russian Jewish mice who escape the evil cat pogroms in Russia and go to America with the promise that there are no cats in America.
[Audio clip]
Elah Feder: There’s a great song for this moment
[Audio clip]
Elah Feder: Of course, they soon discover that there are cats in America and that the streets aren’t paved with cheese. But I couldn’t help it. When I heard about Tilly’s time in America, this song kept coming to mind because for Tilly, there were no cats in America.
American life was beyond anything she had imagined. Her only regret was that she had never left sooner. And his new boss, Alfred Romer, played a very important role in all of this.
Émilie Buchholtz: He was famous for throwing parties, you know, picnics and family reunions, everyone was family and there was whistling and singing and, you know, and he was the most extraordinary scientist in the field of vertebrate paleontology, there’s a major award and it’s named after him and George Simpson, it’s called the Romer Simpson Prize.
Elah Feder: The Americans delighted Tilly with all their overt feelings and kindness. She looks like a serious German lady. Um, okay, just for an example, there’s a story she told in an interview with Radio Bremen. It was the late ’50s, and she explained that initially she took a second job teaching zoology at Wellesley College because, you know, as Emily mentioned, the museum had almost no funding for her position,
Anyway, she was teaching at Wellesley and afterward they told her that the girls, quote, loved her so much.
Tilly Edinger: They know they really want to do research, but the girls love them so much. That was the reason.
Elah Feder: And Tilly found it so strange. They didn’t say, you know, we want you back. You are a good zoologist or a good teacher. They told him that the girls liked him.
Tilly Edinger: The girls loved you so much. Don’t you think it’s not German and very American?
Elah Feder: It’s so un-German. So American.
Katie Hafner: It’s so American, but was what she was doing for Romer humiliating for her? She thought-
Elah Feder: No.
Katie Hafner: Wait a minute, I have a doctorate. I understand some things that you don’t understand. You know, I discovered things, I wrote a book, right? Nothing?
Elah Feder: Not remotely. I mean, remember she was a completely unpaid volunteer for years in Germany. She knew it was a position that they had scraped together, you know, the little bit of money it took to save her life. I…she could definitely feel entitled to more, but from everything I’ve read, she seemed very grateful and delighted with Romer.
I mean, I found something like a 10 page diary entry that she wrote just to talk about a horrible editor who was tripping over her. And, you know, eventually she had to meet her editor, and Romer was in the room with her, and she said that because he was there, she felt protected. Like he was just looking out for her, that’s how she saw him.
Katie Hafner: Like a father figure. How old is she at this point?
Elah Feder: Mm, let’s see. So she met him in her forties, but she was in her late fifties by then.
Katie Hafner: So not a child.
Elah Feder: Not a child.
Katie Hafner: And then his sister is in Türkiye and what about the rest of his family in Germany?
Elah Feder: Well, his sister ended up coming to the United States too. His parents both died before the Nazi era. Um, but she did, she lost loved ones in the Holocaust. In that same radio interview we heard earlier. She described returning to Frankfurt after the war and how the city was in ruins and everyone had left.
Tilly in the background: I can only say how I got back. When I came back, everything was empty. Yes. The German family is, my brother was gassed, my favorite cousin and one of my fathers were shot and my only aunt, my favorite aunt, my favorite person in the world, at the age of 80, when she received this message telling her that she had to prepare for deportation, committed suicide.
Elah Feder: So she said, When she came back, everything was empty, her brother had been gassed, she had cousins who had been shot.
Elah Feder: His favorite aunt, at the age of eighty, when she received orders to prepare for expulsion, committed suicide. Another aunt died in a concentration camp
Katie Hafner: Horrible. So, everyone who was dearest to him in the world.
Elah Feder: Yeah. This is the only mention I could find where she talks about losing her family to the Nazis.
You know, overall my impression was of a woman who was just determined not to think too much about the past and move forward, which I think is pretty typical of her generation.
But yes, Tilly. I, it’s, it’s funny, I, I have a double photo of her. I have this image of a very tough and independent German woman. She was famous for chain-smoking in front of the museum building and turning off her hearing aids so no one would bother her. But at the same time, she is simply delighted with American life, her American friends and her work there. It was in the United States that she published a very famous second volume. This time, she posts about horses.
Katie Hafner: Which horses? Did you say horses?
Elah Feder: I said horses.
Katie Hafner: Why horses?
Elah Feder: Apparently when she was in Germany she said something cheeky about how it would be easy for Americans to study horse brain evolution, but I guess they just don’t seem interested. And then when she got to the States, yeah, she was, she was saying she said something a little cheeky about how it would be super easy. And then when she came to the United States, famous paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson was like, okay, a hottie.
I’m paraphrasing, but you know, why don’t you do that? And, uh, it turned out to be a lot harder than I expected. But she did it and she published this very famous book – in some circles – about the evolution of the horse brain. And she discovered a lot of very interesting things. But I’ll tell you what I personally found interesting: she discovered that over time, their brains developed more capabilities, but not just by growing proportionally. Do you have any idea how a brain could do this?
Katie Hafner: No, that sounds painful.
Elah Feder: How painful is it?
Katie Hafner: Well, if you think your brain is swelling and your skull only has a limited supply.
Elah Feder: Can you imagine a meningitis situation?
Katie Hafner: Yes.
Elah Feder: All right. That’s not what’s happening. Emily Buchholta explained this to me.
Émilie Buchholtz: I’m going to have to explain a little bit about the anatomy of the brain to do this, but basically the cells are outside the brain and the wiring is inside the brain.
Elah Feder: So if you have a really smooth, round brain, not much surface area, you’re going to run out of capacity.
Émilie Buchholtz: The outer surface of a sphere is not able to support a large increase in processing of incoming information without becoming massively larger and collapsing.
Elah Feder: So basically brains are becoming more curved, you know how brains are all curved and bendable.
Katie Hafner: Oh! I see.
Elah Feder: So ancient brains are quite smooth, reptile brains – very smooth. Even some mammals like hedgehogs: smooth.
Katie Hafner: I knew they were stupid.
Elah Feder: You know what, they know what they need to know.
Katie Hafner: Alright, so how does Tilly’s story end?
Elah Feder: Well, as he got older, his hearing loss progressed. She felt more and more vulnerable and isolated. She couldn’t hear what people were saying at lectures. She felt like she was always left out of conversations.
She sometimes had trouble falling asleep because she was so nervous that she wouldn’t hear the alarm in the morning, and she would just lie there awake. So I think Tilly’s last years were difficult in many ways, but she was still working. But she still had projects that she was passionate about even after she officially retired in 1964. One of the things that she worked on that her colleagues finished after her death, that would actually become a very important reference work for the field, something that everyone knows.
But she couldn’t complete it because, in 1967, she was walking in Cambridge and was hit by a delivery truck, and later died in hospital. and it was claimed that she simply did not hear the truck coming because perhaps her hearing aid was turned off at the time.
Katie Hafner: And how old was she?
Elah Feder: She was 69 years old.
Katie Hafner: Oh, how terrible. So Ella, could you summarize what she brought
Elah Feder: First, it created a new field, a subdiscipline of paleontology. But I think actually talking about her accomplishments is integral to understanding why she’s lost, uh, because…
Katie Hafner: So you consider it truly lost?
Elah Feder: Well, there are degrees of loss. The kind of people that we hear about widely and are really well known in society are people who often have discovered something great or invented something. She did not discover radiation, she did not invent a polio vaccine. For example, there is no big, flashy scientific breakthrough. Most of his work was very methodical, deep, fundamental, and field-defining work. Collect these fossils, organize them by time, describe the patterns, describe their shapes.
He’s not the kind of person you usually learn about in school. Science is sometimes described as a relay race. You know, the scientists who get the big prizes and all the attention are usually the ones who have crossed the finish line or a finish line because science doesn’t stop forever. But the work of these people is totally dependent on other scientists who have done less glamorous, but truly critical, fundamental work; This is how I see Tilly’s work.
Katie Hafner: And where has this left us? Where are we now? What is the state of the art?
Elah Feder: So when I started working on this story, I thought the kind of work Tilly was doing was a thing of the past. Because I mean, these days, if you want to study brain evolution, there are a lot of really interesting new tools, and I’ll give you just one example.
Katie Hafner: Okay, please do it.
Elah Feder: Okay, this is a real study I came across. They took human DNA and grew a miniature brain in the lab – it’s called a brain organoid because it’s not actually a complete brain, thank goodness.
Katie Hafner: Wait, when you say in the laboratory, like in a jar?
Elah Feder: It might be in a jar, it probably needs a little liquid.
Katie Hafner: Yeah, uh, huh.
Elah Feder: That’s not the question. The fact is that they grew like a tiny organoid of Brian from human tissue. Then they wanted to know what Neanderthal DNA might do to this, so they took a gene extracted from a Neanderthal fossil, they introduced the gene by CRISPR into this miniature human brain, and they discovered that the synapses fired more quickly. It’s kind of like the universe of things they can do now to try to understand how the brain changes over time.
It’s a world that Tolly probably never imagined, right?
Katie Hafner: Yeah, exactly true.
Elah Feder: But that doesn’t mean his work isn’t relevant.
Katie Hafner: And how does that mean his work isn’t unimportant-
Elah Feder: Isn’t that irrelevant? Well, fossils – fossils still matter. Yes, you can look at the DNA of a Neanderthal, but if you want to know how big its brain was, what its shape was, you still get very valuable clues from the fossils themselves, and that’s where techniques like Tilly’s come into play.
Ashley Morhardt: I would say people still watch Endocasts.
Elah Feder: Ashley Morehart is an associate professor of anatomy and neuroscience at the University of Washington, and she is a modern-day paleoneurologist.
Ashley Morhardt: But rather than focusing on physical endoccasts, there was a huge push. Study them non-destructively.
Elah Feder: Because if you make an endocast, pouring silicone or latex into a skull, you risk damaging it to remove it.
So now you do a CT scan of a skull, you create a 3D model of what the brain cavity looks like, and you get what’s called a digital endocast. So Ashley, she usually works with a micro-scanner, but she says if there’s something really big like a triceratops skull, she goes to the hospital.
Ashley Morhardt: We go there after dinner or even in the middle of the night to do part of the scanning. And it’s just kind of a little sleepover where we get together and run things through the scanner.
Katie Hafner: And ask people like Ashley about Tilly’s legacy.
Elah Feder: This really surprised me. I contacted Ashley to talk about modern paleoneurology, and she knew all about Tilly. She was basically like an amateur Tilly scholar. She knew there was a chain smoke outside the museum.
Ashley Morhardt: She would go out in her big fur coat and puff and puff all day long.
Elah Feder: She knew her childhood
Ashley Morhardt: She had an interesting upbringing in that her father was a human neurologist…
Elah Feder: And I was like, wait, is Tilly famous? But no. Tilly is really well known if you’re into vertebrate paleontology.
Ashley Morhardt: Certainly familiar to anyone studying vertebrate brain evolution.
Katie Hafner: Very niche.
Elah Feder: Yes. Yeah, exactly. Like he’s a superstar. You will have come across his reference works.
You may also know his book on horses. But yeah, beyond that, she’s one of those people like the first leg of the relay race that you know isn’t usually in high school textbooks. Are you going to teach Tilly to the children? I hope… Will we put her in the next children’s book?
Katie Hafner: We absolutely must do this. Consider it done.
Elah Feder: All right. Well, I am reassured.
So degrees of loss, right? Known to some, but not to most.
Katie Hafner: And it’s definitely worth knowing
Elah Feder: This is why we are here.
This episode was produced by me, Elah Feder, Natalia Sanchez Loayza is our lead producer. Our music was composed by Lizzy Younan. We had Lexi Atiya help with fact-checking and Jessica Taylor collected archival materials.
Thank you to our co-executive producers, Amy Scharf and Katie Hafner, to Eowyn Burtner, our program manager, and to marketing director, Lily Whear.
We are distributed by PRX, our publishing partner is Scientific American. Our funding comes in part from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and the Anne Wojcicki Foundation. If you visit lostwomenofscience.orgyou can find many additional items for this episode as well as a donate button.
We’ll see you next time!
Host
Katie Hafner
Main producer
Get rid of Feder
Guests
Emily Buchholtz is a vertebrate paleontologist and professor emeritus at Wellesley College. She and Ernst-August Seyfarth co-authored articles on Edinger’s project. life And science.
Ashley Morhardt is a paleoneurologist and associate professor of anatomy and neuroscience at Washington University in St. Louis. His research focuses on evolutionary patterns of dinosaur brains and the size and shape of their brain regions to understand how, when, and why vertebrate brains evolved.
Further reading:
Evolution of the horse brain. Tilly Edinger. Geological Society of America, 1948