Emiliano Aguirre
Emiliano Aguirre
Main page
993491

Emiliano Aguirre

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Emiliano Aguirre

Emiliano Aguirre Enríquez (5 October 1925 – 11 October 2021) was a Spanish paleontologist, known for his works at archaeological site of Atapuerca, whose excavations he directed from 1978 until his retirement in 1990. He received the Prince of Asturias Award in 1997.

Aguirre was born in Ferrol, Galicia, on 5 October 1925. He studied humanities and philosophy at the Facultad Eclesiástica de Alcalá, natural sciences at the University of Madrid in 1955, and theology at the University of Granada. He was a former Jesuit with a PhD in biological sciences with a thesis on extinct elephants, supervised by Miquel Crusafont i Pairó.

Between 1955 and 1956, Aguirre was a prospector of dinosaur sites in the Tremp Basin [es], where he helped excavating the remains of Abditosaurus, and a prospector and discoverer of thirty new marine and continental Cenozoic sites in Granada between 1956 and 1961.

Aguirre's first excavations were carried out in the 1960s. Between 1961 and 1963, he excavated, together with Francis Clark Howell, the paleontological site of Torralba and Ambrona, using new multidisciplinary methodologies. In 1963, he designed the Arbona Museum, the first museum with in situ exhibition of fossil remains in Europe. In 1963, he was part of the Spanish Mission of Archaeological Salvage in Nubia, in which he studied the human remains at the necropolis of Argin (Sudan). In 1968, thanks to a postdoctoral fellowship from the Wenner-Gren Foundation, he traveled to South Africa to study early hominid fossils and to Kenya to excavate in the Tugen Hills with the archaeologist Louis Leakey.

Aguirre joined the Spanish National Research Council as a researcher in 1974, and left the Society of Jesus.

Between 1978 and 1982, Aguirre was a professor of paleontology at the University of Zaragoza and at the Complutense University of Madrid between 1982 and 1984. On 24 May 2000, he was sworn in as an honorary academic of the Spanish Royal Academy of Sciences, a position he held until his death. He supervised 26 doctoral theses.

Aguirre was a member of the Academy of Fine Arts and History 'Institución Fernán González'.

In the early years of his professional career in the 1950s, Aguirre promoted conferences, meetings, and scientific publications at a time when the national Catholicism of Francisco Franco's regime hindered the dissemination of Charles Darwin's theory.

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.