J. William Schopf
James William Schopf (born September 27, 1941) is an American
paleobiologist and professor of earth sciences at the
University of California Los Angeles. He is also Director of the Center for the Study of Evolution and the Origin of Life, and a member of the Department of Earth and Space Sciences, the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics, and the Molecular Biology Institute at UCLA. He is most well known for his study of
Precambrian prokaryotic life in
Australia's
Apex chert. Schopf has published extensively in the peer reviewed literature about the
origins of life on
Earth. He is the first to discover Precambrian microfossils in
stromatolitic sediments of Australia (1965), South Africa (1966), Russia (1977), India (1978), and China (1984). He served as
NASA's principal investigator of
lunar samples during 1969–1974.
Provided by Wikipedia