During my studies of the history of paleontology I have often stumbled upon the work of the same scientists over and over again. The 19th century anatomists Richard Owen and Thomas Henry Huxley, especially, worked on a variety of fossil vertebrates and were critical to the establishment of paleontology as an evolutionary science, yet there are other influential researchers who have not retained the same level of notoriety. The Scottish paleontologist Robert Broom, an immigrant to South Africa who belonged to the generation of scientists after Owen and Huxley, was among these lesser-known figures.

What Broom is best known for will depend on who you ask. A paleoanthropologist will tell you that Broom was one of the few scientists who believed