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Richard Carr Fox '55

Oct. 3, 1933-Apr. 13, 2022

Richard Carr Fox ’55 died on April 13, 2022, in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. Born on Oct. 3, 1933, in Lowell, Mass., he spent his early childhood in nearby Nabnasset. In 1938, his family moved to Syracuse, where Dick graduated from William Nottingham High School. On the Hill, he unaccountably acquired the nickname “Mox,” majored in biology and English literature, and joined Psi Upsilon fraternity, serving as its president in his senior year. He played lacrosse all four years.

From Hamilton, Dick went to the New York State College of Forestry at Syracuse University to study zoology, earning his master’s degree in 1957. That same year, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to the Department of Medical Zoology at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research. He was a laboratory technician in the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Disease Laboratory, studying tropical diseases and screening drugs to fight them.

By the time he was honorably discharged as a specialist 4 in August 1959, Dick was most interested in mammalian functional anatomy. He was accepted into the doctoral program in zoology at the University of Kansas and studied mammalian zoology and museology. He worked at the University of Texas Marine Biological Station in Port Aransas, Texas, and was also a member of research excursions to the Yucatán and Baja California to collect examples of modern amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals for the collections of the Natural History Museum of the University of Kansas.

Dick discovered a profound interest in paleontology thanks to coursework in vertebrate paleontology and functional morphology while studying at Kansas. That passion came into sharp focus during a field trip to Wyoming’s White River Badlands, where Dick unearthed his first fossil: the skull of an oreodont, an ancestor of modern pigs and camels that lived between 40 and 5.3 million years ago. The discovery earned Dick an assistantship during which he worked in Oklahoma processing fossiliferous rock from the early Permian period of the Paleozoic Era, about 299 to 252 million years ago.

By the time he completed his doctorate in zoology in 1965, Dick had received a joint appointment as assistant professor for vertebrate paleontology in the departments of Geology and Zoology at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, which was his professional home for the rest of his life. He taught a variety of courses and supervised the research of dozens of doctoral and postdoctoral students; he encouraged them to discover their own research topics and guided them to think critically and independently about those subjects. Beginning in 1985, Dick was among the first paleontologists in the West to welcome students from the People’s Republic of China. Later, he studied Chinese to prepare for field research in China, where he collaborated with one of his former students who had become a University of Peking faculty member. 

Dick also founded and curated of the University of Alberta’s Laboratory of Vertebrate Paleontology, the first institution of its kind in Western Canada; edited The Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology (1996–98); and sponsored junior members of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The quantity of his published research bespeaks a formidable intellect, one capable of continually formulating new research questions in his field. For the majority of well over 100 published papers and book chapters, he was the sole author, and many have remained foundational to his field and continue to be frequently cited. 

Dick retired from the University of Alberta in 1999 after 35 years and was appointed professor emeritus, but in reality he never left the field of paleontology. He maintained an office in the university’s Department of Biological Sciences up to the time of his death, continuing to collaborate on research and publication. His influence was great enough that a paper of which he was a co-author (with the principal author, a former student) was published in The Journal of Paleontology in January 2023, nine months after his death.

Regarding his experience on the Hill, Dick was candid. In 1989, responding to an alumni survey, he wrote: “Hamilton was the most intellectually demanding college/university that I attended as a student, and those standards continue to affect my expectations for my own students almost 40 years later! I have found the social pretensions that accompany the Hamilton experience to be less inspiring.”

Richard C. Fox never married. He is survived by his brother, Peter C. Fox ’53, P’82, his niece Bethany Fox Tulloch ’82, P’18, and his great-nephew Andrew Fox Tulloch ’18.

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Note: Memorial biographies published prior to 2004 will not appear on this list.



Necrology Writer and Contact:
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Email: Chris.Wilkinson@mail.wvu.edu

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