The First 75 Years A History of the Paleontological Research Institution

About this book

From the preface:

"This book has been written and published in celebration of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the Paleontological Research Institution (PRI), and as such it is first and foremost a history of this unique organization and its impact in and beyond the worlds of science and education. All histories, of course, are subjective, but this one is burdened by two sources of additional potential bias. The first is that the history of PRI is not over, and is changing rapidly even as I write these words. This book is therefore not really of the conventional form of many such celebratory histories, which are often along the lines of "from small beginnings long ago we have now achieved success." Although a lot has happened in the past 75 years, and particularly in the past 15, PRI is today still very much a work in progress – still in the process of becoming. Thus this little volume is only a status report in the midst of ongoing institutional change, rather than purely a retrospective of events long past. This means that readers of this book in the not-too-distant future might see and judge events described here very differently than I do today.

Secondly, because I have been personally "hard-wired" to PRI for almost 15 years, many of the events described here are of great personal significance to me, and so this history is an inevitably subjective and biased view of these events. I have nevertheless tried to maintain as much objectivity as I could. [...]"

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