Tedford, Richard H.

Richard Hall Tedford (April 25, 1929 – July 15, 2011) was Curator Emeritus in the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, having been named as curator in 1969. Born in Encino, California, he received a bachelor's degree from the University of California, Los Angeles with a major in chemistry and earned his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley in 1959. Tedford was one of the foremost authorities on the evolution of Carnivores and had been working, often with Prof. Xiaoming Wang, on the fossil history of the Canidae establishing the basis on the evolutionary relationship of canids over the past 40 million years. Tedford was a resident of Demarest, New Jersey at the time of his death on July 15, 2011, having earlier lived in nearby Cresskill. After suffering from colon cancer, his death followed a skull fracture that resulted from an accidental fall in his home. For his work on tertiary mammals uncovered at the Australian Fossil Mammal Sites (Riversleigh), he was commemorated in the epithet of an Eocene microbat species Rhinonicteris tedfordi.