description Elisabeth Vrba Overview
Elisabeth Vrba was a South African-born American paleontologist who taught at Yale University and studied the evolution of African mammals. She developed the turnover-pulse hypothesis, which proposes that episodes of environmental change can produce concentrated waves of extinction, speciation, and migration. With evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould, she introduced the term exaptation for traits that acquire functions different from those for which they originally evolved.
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What does Elisabeth Vrba's turnover-pulse hypothesis propose?
It proposes that major environmental or climatic changes can trigger concentrated pulses of extinction, migration, and speciation across several lineages. Vrba developed the idea partly through her study of African antelope fossils.
What is an exaptation in Vrba and Stephen Jay Gould's terminology?
An exaptation is a feature used for a function different from the one for which it originally evolved. Gould and Vrba introduced the term in a 1982 paper, with feathers later becoming a standard example.
Did Elisabeth Vrba study human evolution directly?
Her main fossil expertise involved African bovids, but her turnover research influenced hypotheses about environmental change and hominin evolution. She examined whether climatic pulses affecting antelopes and other mammals also coincided with changes in human lineages.
Where did Elisabeth Vrba conduct her academic work?
Vrba trained and worked in South Africa before joining Yale University's faculty in 1986. At Yale she became a prominent figure in paleontology and macroevolutionary theory.
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