Donald Prothero

Prothero grew up in the Glendale, California area, the son of Clifford R. Prothero (1920–2004), a technical illustrator for Lockheed, and Shirley M. (McDonald) Prothero (1924–2016), an artist and homemaker.

He attended the University of California, Riverside where he studied paleontology under Dr. Michael O. Woodburne and Dr. Michael Murphy and earned Phi Beta Kappa during his junior year.

Donald Ross Prothero (February 21, 1954) is an American geologist, paleontologist, and author who specializes in mammalian paleontology and magnetostratigraphy, a technique to date rock layers of the Cenozoic era and its use to date the climate changes which occurred 30–40 million years ago.

He is the author or editor of more than 30 books and over 300 scientific papers, including at least 5 geology textbooks.

Stephen Jay Gould cited Prothero's research on the lack of response to climate change in mammals from the Eocene, Oligocene and Pleistocene epochs to support the punctuated equilibrium model of evolution.

He called Prothero "the best punctuated equilibrium researcher on the West Coast".

He received his Ph.D. in geological sciences in 1982 from Columbia University, New York.

His fellowships include the Geological Society of America, the Paleontological Society, the Linnean Society of London (1987), the Guggenheim Foundation (1988), the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and the National Science Foundation.

He served as the president and vice president of the Pacific Section of Society for Sedimentary Geology, and five years as the program chair for the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

He became involved in the skeptical movement in the mid-1990s, when Michael Shermer invited him to join the editorial board of The Skeptics Society.

In 1991, he appeared on the television game show Jeopardy! and defeated Ben Stein on the show Win Ben Stein's Money in 1999.

He was also featured in the Mr. Deity and the Flood episode of the video series Mr. Deity.

Further, he debated the Young Earth creationist Duane Gish early in his career.

For 27 years, he was a member of the faculty at Occidental College and he previously taught at California Institute of Technology, Knox College, Vassar College and Columbia University where he led many undergraduate paleontological and geological field trips.

He is currently a research associate in vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County.

Prothero was one of the earliest paleontologists to use the concept of palaeomagnetism in the study of continental rocks.

Palaeomagnetism uses the microscopic iron within sedimentary rock to read the alignment of the magnetic field and correlate that with the known history of the polarity reversals of the Earth's magnetic field.

The magnetic reversals are precisely dated and consistent worldwide which allows these rocks to be studied in climate science and evolution.

In addition to his research in magnetostratigraphy, another area of Prothero's research is the evolution of hoofed mammals, especially rhinos, camels, peccaries, and horses.

Prothero's work on documenting evolutionary history of fossil vertebrates was cited by Richard Dawkins in his book The Greatest Show on Earth: the Evidence of Evolution.

He has also been a member of Society for the Study of Mammalian Evolution since 2005.

Skeptic Society founder Michael Shermer called Prothero's 2007 book, Evolution: What the Fossils Say And Why It Matters, "the best book ever produced on the subject."

He has also been featured as a scientific consultant and was interviewed on several television documentaries, including the Are Rhinos Dinos? episode of TLC's Paleoworld, the History Channel's Prehistoric Monsters Revealed, the episodes of National Geographic's Prehistoric Predators covering the entelodon and hyaenodon, the series Walking with Prehistoric Beasts on BBC, and the amphicyon or Bear Dog episode of Monsters Resurrected.

As a result of Prothero's books about evolution in 2007 and climate change in 2009, he recognized that "those same people who were denying evolution are often the exact same people who deny climate [change]."

His first appearance as a panelist at The Amazing Meeting was in 2010.

In October 2012, Prothero appeared in his capacity as a paleontologist on Conspiracy Road Trip, a BBC television documentary in which five individuals who self-identified as Creationists participated in a road trip along the western coast of the United States, meeting with various experts on the topic, exchanging views and questions with people holding differing views.

Prothero has frequently written about the topic of cryptozoology, a pseudoscience and subculture, which he categorizes along with Holocaust denial and UFO abductions claims as aspects of American culture that are "clearly baloney".

Prothero's 2013 book with Daniel Loxton, Abominable Science: The Origin of Yeti, Nessie, and Other Cryptids discusses the subculture in depth.

In a review by Adrienne Mayor of Stanford University, she describes the book as "An entertaining, educational, passionate, and valuable handbook for readers interested getting a scientific perspective on the field of cryptozoology. With marvelous artwork and deeply researched histories of the various creatures, this is an impressive and authoritative book."

Prothero looks at the evidence regarding global warming and the role humans have had on it.

In his book Greenhouse of the Dinosaurs, Prothero states "geologists and paleoclimatologists know a lot about past greenhouse worlds, and the icehouse planet that has existed for the past 33 million years. We have a good understanding of how and why the Antarctic ice sheet first appeared at that time, and how the Arctic froze over about 3.5 million years ago, beginning the 24 glacial and interglacial episodes of the 'Ice Ages' that have occurred since then."

In his article in eSkeptic, Prothero details carbon dioxide increases, melting polar icecaps, melting glaciers and sea level rise as some of the more important areas that point to anthropogenic global warming.

He also goes into details to outline climate change deniers' arguments and rebuttals to those arguments and finally talks about why people deny climate change.

Prothero grew up in a Presbyterian household, but eventually became an atheist.

This realization led him to research and author "Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten Our Future" in 2013 as he explained during an interview on the podcast Skepticality:

There are lots of people out there who accept science when it's convenient, but there's a lot of things that science tells us they don't want to hear and so then they reject those so-called inconvenient truths.

And so this sort of weird, little way of doing things is not only true of creationists, it's true of climate deniers, it's true of AIDS deniers, anti-vaxxers, a whole bunch of various kinds of alternative medicines—it's a very common thread.

And many of them have very similar strategies in the way they battle against the reality of science... this is a scary thing because they will accept what science has done in the way of "give us progress" and "give us technology" and "give us transportation", and yet they just don't want science when it gets in the way of ideology or religion.

In 2015, Prothero was elected a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Prothero is on the editorial board of Skeptic magazine, and in the past has served as an associate or technical editor for such scientific journals as Geology, Paleobiology, and Journal of Paleontology.