 |
| Zofia Keilen-Jaworowska, linocut print, 11" x 14" by Ele Willoughby, 2025 |
Zofia Keilan-Jaworowksa (née Keilan, 1925-2015) was a Polish paleobiologist, famous for a series of Polish-Mongolian expeditions she lead in between 1963 and 1971 to the Gobi desert, where she discovered dinosaurs including the Deinocheirus, and Gallimimus and where she and her colleagues found the “Fighting Dinosaurs” fossil specimen in 1971 preserving a Protoceratops andrewsi and Velociraptor mongoliensis trapped in combat about 74 million years ago. Her research covered a wide range of palaeontology but her special interest was the origin and evolution of early mammals. She was the first woman to serve on the executive of the International Union of Geological Sciences and was a trailblazer in palaeontology.
Born in Sokołów Podlaski, Poland in 1925, her family, father Franciszek, mother Maria and she and older sister Krystyna ended up in a living borough of Warsaw. In 1939, when she was 14, Nazi Germany invaded Poland and triggered WWII. Germany would occupy Poland until the end of the war in Europe in 1945 and non-Germans were barred from higher education, on pain of death. The Polish resistance organized a clandestine network of instruction, risking their lives to continue teaching Polish students. In 1942 one of her school friends Jana Prot confessed that her family was loosing their apartment and she would have to leave the secret school; Zofia and Krystyna told Jana she should come live with them as they had room in their home. Their parents were fond of Jana and agreed, treated her as a third daughter. A visiting relative let the family know that Jana's father Jan Prot, formerly Berlinerbau, a well-known chemist, and mother had converted to Catholicism from Judaism and thus housing Jana would dangerous. In Poland, the Nazis imposed the death penalty for helping Jews. Her parents told Zofia that they were so nervous they could not sleep, but opted to protect Jana. Her family found her a place she could stay and work on a farm, but when someone threatened to denounce her, the family took Jana back in, until the three girls completed high school in 1943. Jana moved out but the family often helped her. The family also hid Romana Laks, a 7 year old Jewish girl until she could get false papers which allowed her to hide in a convent. After high school Zofia secretly studied zoology at the University of Warsaw and joined the resistance "Grey Ranks," an underground paramilitary group organized from scouting groups, who trained her to be a medic. Zofia put her medic skills to work, with Jana who became a nursing student, caring for and transporting the wounded during the Warsaw Uprising, the 1944 failed attempt to oust the Germans. She found both shelter and the opportunity for volunteer work in the Zoological Museum which fostered her love for evolution and vertebrate palaeontology. In the wake of the subsequent retaliatory destruction of much of the city by Nazi forces, including the Department of Geology, when the university reopened to Polish students in 1945, she attended lectures offered by renown Polish palaeontologist Roman Kozłowski in his own home, which captured her imagination.
She completed a masters in zoology and a doctorate in 1953 in paleontology at Warsaw University. Poland is rich in marine invertebrate fossils and her earliest research focused on trilobites, sea worms and Paleozoic (541-242 million years ago) marine fossils. Her innovative methods let her prepare the complex and delicate jaws of sea worm fossils. While at in 1950 graduate school she met her future husband, radiobiologist Zbigniew Jaworowska during a mounting climbing trip. They married in 1958 and had a son, Mariusz in 1959. After graduate school she followed Kozłowski to work at the Institute of Paleobiology run by the Polish Academy of Science. Zbigniew was a big part of her life and well-known to her colleagues; their research interests intersected when she brought some fossils home, where he had a Geiger counter and noticed they were radioactive.
Now living behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War, Keilan-Jaworowska realized that she had an opportunity to explore Mongolia, a Soviet satellite state, and that this was somewhere Western scientists could no longer travel. In the 1920s American Museum of Natural History expeditions had found dinosaurs which were new to science like Velociraptor and Protoceratops. When Kozłowski retired in 1961, Keilan-Jaworowska succeed him as Directory of the Institute of Paleobiology. As the Polish Academy of Science had just signed a cooperative agreement with Mongolia, at Kozłowski's suggestion she wrote a proposal for a series of joint Polish-Mongolian palaeontology expeditions to the Gobi Desert to study Late Cretaceous (80-75 million years ago) fossils. The Polish and Mongolian Academies of Science approved her proposal and she was selected as lead scientist and organizer, the first woman to lead a dinosaur excavation expedition. She lead seven of the total of eight such expeditions. Mounting expeditions to the remote Gobi, with its rash climate, and with limited financial and technological resources available in Cold War Poland was a tremendous challenge, but these expeditions were incredibly successful.
Wandering alone in a gully after rain, unusual for the desert, she wrote "found an unusual skeleton consisting of complete forelimbs and a shoulder girdle of enormous size, along with fragmentary ribs." The strange three-fingered limbs were 2.5 metres long! So, they named the dinosaur Deinocheirus, or terrible hand. Along with this discovery, they found many Tarbosaurus in the tyrannosaur family, the "thick-headed lizard" pachycephalosaurs like Homalocephale, ankylosaurs, sauropods like Nemegtosaurus, horned Cerotopsia, and ostrich-shaped ornithomimids like Gallimimus. During one single expedition in 1965, her team shipped 20 tonnes of fossils back to Poland. During the 1971 expedition, team member Andrzej Sulimski spotted a velociraptor; when the team excavated, they found it was entwined with a second fossil: a protoceratops! Now regarded a national treasure of Mongolia and housed at a museum in Ulanbaatar, this famous find is known as the "Fighting Dinosaurs" and included in my portrait. She also discovered fossils of types of crocodile, lizard, turtle and birds. Nothing could distract her from this work. Once she suffered a ruptured eardrum in the field during a sandstorm; she flew to Warsaw for surgery and then returned immediately to the field.
Despite the Cold War, Keilan-Jaworowska fostered camaraderie and built networks with leading Western scientists and around the world, disseminating the results of their expeditions as she spent the next quarter century interpreting the results of the expeditions with their unprecedented numbers of a wide variety of very complete fossils.
While making all these exciting dinosaur finds, Keilan-Jaworowska made her largest contributions in study of the early mammals of the Late Cretaceous. Previously, scientists had some fossil jaws and teeth but now much of what we know about the very origins and evolution of mammals can be traced back to her trailblazing research. She found many complete skulls and skeletons of most of the known groups of Late Cretaceous mammals. The final Polish-Mongolian expedition recovered 180 Mesozoic mammal skulls, the largest such collection worldwide, at the time. She changed the ways these animals were conceived. They had been thought rare and undiverse. She also changed our understanding of species, upending decades of thinking by showing that Deltatheridium, for instance, was closer to marsupials than placental mammals. She became an expert in Multituberculates, the early rodent-like forms like the Catopsbaatar in my portrait. She is especially for using laborious serial sections through the minute skulls. She showed these Multituberculates were viviparous, that is they bore live young, she studied their brains and estimated their intelligence and even showed some were venomous. She also made significant contributions to our understanding of the Eutheria clade, whose descendants include living placental mammals.
She really launched a new age of paleontological discovery. She published 230 scientific papers and books. Her first Nature paper in 1969 was very cited; she published 8 papers in Nature in total. Her 1970 book Hunting for Dinosaurs, translated from Polish to English was a scientific best seller. She described yurt hotels, challenges of communicating without being able to speak Mongolian, the lack of water and logistics challenges of providing for a team of 30, vehicle troubles and talented Mongolian drivers, sandstorms which descended like eclipses, darkening the sky, biting insects, venomous snakes and spiders, and rewarding if exhausting working in the heat. She was a visiting professor at Harvard from 1973 to 1974. By 1980, her membership in the Solidarity trade union made it complicated to remain in Poland. She stepped down as Director of the Institute of Paleobiology in 1982 and was a Visiting Professor at the National Museum of Natural History of Paris for two years. At 68 she was a consultant on Jurassic Park for Stephen Spielberg. At 70 she took the role of Head of the Department of Palaeontology at the University of Oslo for 8 years. Dedicated to public outreach, she modernized the exhibits there, using what she had learned from setting up the large exhibits of the Gobi fossils. She returned to Poland in 1995, where she was appointed Professor Emerita at the Institute of Paleobiology. She kept working and publishing, long after retirement. She received the Romer-Simpson Medal, the highest honour of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in 1996, for "sustained and outstanding excellence in scientific research and contributions to vertebrate palaeontology." In 1999, she received the Righteous Among Nations award for her aid to Jews during WWII. Both Jana and Romana survived the war. Zofia and Jana maintained their friendship and Jana was close with her family. Her parents corresponded with the Laks family and visited when in New York in 1976. Zofia published the key reference text Mammals From the Age of Dinosaurs (with Leo and Cifelli) in 2004 at 79. She served as editor of Acta Palaeontologica Polonica where open access was her watchword and where she helped authors from the developing world. Her obituary in Nature reads "Her style was, at times, unapologetically exacting - an apprenticeship with her was akin to martial-arts training with a Buddhist monk - but she pushed the rest of us to reach for better science." Her co-author Zhe-He Leo wrote, "She is the rarest among the rare - she has been a leader in making important scientific contributions, and also a gregarious and charismatic figure, both of which have made palaeontology a better science, and palaeontologists worldwide a better community." Several fossils have been named in her honour including Keilanodon, Keilantherium, Zofiabataar, Zofiagale and Indobaatar zofiae.
References
Cifelli, Richard L., Jørn Hurum, Magdelena Borsuk-Białynicka, Zhe-He Luo, and Andrzej Kaim, In Memorium: Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, Acta Palaeontol. Pol. 60 (2): 287–290, 2015
Crumpton, Nick. Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska. Trowelblazers. August 27, 2014.
Delset, Lene Liebe. Legends of Rock: Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska. The Paleontological Society. Newsletter No. 97. March, 2018.
Fighting Dinosaurs, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2025
Mancini, Mark, She's the Most Famous Paleobiologist You May Not Know, How Stuff Works blog, accessed January, 2025.
Rytlowa, Jadwiga. The Keilan Family. Stories of Rescue, POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, November 2016.
Scott, Michon. Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, StrangeScience.Net blog, December 21, 2024.
The Legend of the Gobi Desert: Professor Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, Research in Poland, 20 December 2024.
Zofia Keilan-Jaworowska, Wikipedia, accessed January, 2025
