George Gaylord Simpson  was an American paleontologist, a scientist who studies animals, plants, and other organisms that lived in prehistoric times .George Gaylord Simpson was born in Chicago, on 16 June 1902 in Chicago, Illinois. He grew up in Denver and graduated from the University of Colorado. Simpson entered the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1918. He later transferred to Yale University, where he received a bachelor's degree in geology in 1923. Simpson received the National Medal of Science in 1965. He was Professor of Zoology at Columbia University, and Curator of the Department of Geology and Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1945 to 1959. He was Curator of the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University from 1959 to 1970, and a Professor of Geosciences at the University of Arizona until his retirement in 1982.  He died on October 6, 1984. He was 82 years old.