Annalisa Berta (born 23 July 1952) is an American

paleontologist Paleontology (), also spelled palaeontology or palæontology, is the scientific study of life that existed prior to, and sometimes including, the start of the Holocene epoch (roughly 11,700 years before present). It includes the study of fossi ...

and professor emerita in the Department of Biology at

San Diego State University San Diego State University (SDSU) is a public research university in San Diego, California. Founded in 1897 as San Diego Normal School, it is the third-oldest university and southernmost in the 23-member California State University (CSU) system ...

. The focus of her research is the evolution and fossil history of

whales Whales are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully aquatic placental marine mammals. As an informal and colloquial grouping, they correspond to large members of the infraorder Cetacea, i.e. all cetaceans apart from dolphins and ...

and other

marine mammals Marine mammals are aquatic mammals that rely on the ocean and other marine ecosystems for their existence. They include animals such as seals, whales, manatees, sea otters and polar bears. They are an informal group, unified only by their re ...

, and among her contributions is the description of the early

pinniped Pinnipeds (pronounced ), commonly known as seals, are a widely distributed and diverse clade of carnivorous, fin-footed, semiaquatic, mostly marine mammals. They comprise the extant families Odobenidae (whose only living member is the walru ...

Enaliarctos ''Enaliarctos''From Greek , ''enalios'', of the sea; and , ''arktos'', bear, "referring to the arctoid, including ursid, Carnivora" (Mitchell & Tedford, 1973, p. 218). is an extinct genus of pinnipedimorph, and may represent the ancestor to all ...

''. Berta received her Ph.D. from the Department of Paleontology at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

in 1979, after which she was a postdoctoral researcher at University of Florida before starting as a faculty member at San Diego State University in 1989. Berta served as president of the

Society of Vertebrate Paleontology The Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) is a professional organization that was founded in the United States in 1940 to advance the science of vertebrate paleontology around the world. Mission and Activities SVP has about 2,300 members inter ...

in 2004-2006 and was elected a Fellow of the

American Association for the Advancement of Science The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) is an American international non-profit organization with the stated goals of promoting cooperation among scientists, defending scientific freedom, encouraging scientific respons ...

(AAAS) in 2015.

References

American paleontologists Living people American taxonomists Women taxonomists Women paleontologists University of California, Berkeley alumni San Diego State University faculty Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 1952 births {{paleontologist-stub