Tag: Fossils

  • Donald Baird Tombstone, Homewood Cemetery

    Donald Baird, 1926–2011, with Hadronector donbairdi engraved on the stone

    This is an ordinary-looking grave marker, except that it is probably the only one in Pittsburgh with an engraving of an extinct fish, and almost certainly the only one with an extinct fish named after the deceased. Donald Baird was a paleontologist who grew up in Pittsburgh, spent his career as a professor at Princeton, and retired to Pittsburgh to putter in the Carnegie Museum’s huge collection of fossils in basement drawers. The fish was named for him by one of his admiring colleagues.