We invite you to the next meeting of the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences (PAU), at which Dr Gerard Gierliński, an outstanding Polish and American palaeontologist, will present a lecture “Where do we come from – Africa or Europe?”. The event will take place on the 24th of October 2024 at 16.00 in Villa Caro in Gliwice.

Dr Gerard Gierliński will refer to his extraordinary discovery of the oldest traces of hominins, which may change our views on human evolution.

The protagonist of the event is a graduate of the Faculty of Natural Sciences at Loyola University in Chicago (USA). He began his scientific work on fossil traces of terrestrial vertebrates in 1984. In 1993, at his home university, he obtained a PhD in palaeontology.

For thirty years, he has been researching fossil tracks, in particular dinosaurs, primarily in the United States, Poland, Italy, Morocco, Jordan, Hungary, Sweden, Greece and China. The result of this large-scale research work is dozens of studies published in renowned international scientific journals.

He has discovered such finds as the oldest traces of plumage in dinosaurs, the oldest traces of birds, the first record of the mating habits of dinosaurs and the discovery of the oldest traces of prehistoric humans in Crete.

He is an employee of the National Geological Institute in Warsaw, and also serves as the vice-president of the “Delta” Association – the creator of Polish Jurassic Parks. For fifteen years he has been working on the educational profile of Jura parks. Gierliński’s original project is an exhibition of dinosaurs in Jura Park Krasiejów (opened in 2010) and an exhibition in Moab Giants (USA), which was created in 2015.