Edinger, Tilly (1897–1967)

German-born US palaeontologist. Her work in vertebrate palaeontology laid the foundations for the study of palaeoneurology. She demonstrated that the evolution of the brain could be studied directly from fossil cranial casts.

Her research shed new light on the evolution of the brain and showed that the progression of brain structure does not proceed at a constant rate in a given family but varies over time; also that the enlarged forebrain evolved several times independently among advanced groups of mammals and there was no single evolutionary scale.

Edinger was born in Frankfurt and studied there and at Heidelberg and Munich. With the Nazis's rise to power, she was forced to leave Germany. After a year in the UK, she went to Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1940, to take up a job at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Edinger's main works are Die fossilen Gehirne/Fossil Brains (1929) and The Evolution of the Horse Brain (1948).