Dominique

Dominique Gommery

My hero is Dominique Gommery. He is a paleoanthropologist. A paleoanthropologist is a scientist that studies human origins and hominids. To many people, Dominique is not a hero. Most people don't even know who he is, but if you know him like I do, than I think you'd like him. All my life, I've wanted to be either a marine biologist or a paleoanthropologist. And Dominique is the coolest paleoanthropologist I've ever met.

I've met multiple, on the National Geographic trips. Those were also great people and great scientist, but not as great as this one. I've also met ocean biologists, one of them is a more famous, her name was Tierney Thys. If you look her up, she has a pretty cool website. She also has a hero, Sylvia Earle. I've met her also! Sylvia was most famous for her accomplishment of diving farther than any female before. She used a device called a "JIM suit." The picture below is a JIM suit. Tierney Thys studies an animal called a "mola mola" or, "Ocean sunfish". If you look one up, you'll have quite a surprise. Even though they look horribly ugly, that's what happens over millions of years of evolution. Three million years ago, they might have looked like a yellow tail tuna, or even a nurse shark, but now they are incredible.

http://i.telegraph.co.uk/multimedia/archive/02653/ (www.http://i.telegraph.co.uk/)

The most incredible hominid that Dominique studies is the Homo Australopithecus. A new Homo Australopithecus site they recently found was right outside of Johannesburg. And to think they scoured the world looking for this and it is a half hour outside one of the biggest cities in South Africa, ha ha. This hominid looks nothing like a human. They look like something between a ape and a gorilla, but that is what we were a million years ago. This is what Dominique studies. He studies these fossils and pieces together the bodies of our very early ancestors. The site that Dominique and Lee Berger is studying at the moment literally might change the science of paleoanthropology. Right now, we think that there is only one species in the history of the world that buries their dead. That is the homo sapiens, or in better words, us. But there is evidence that the homo australopithecus might have also. This is huge. Every palaeoanthropology textbook that you come by says we are the only ones who bury our dead. This might change pretty soon. The way they know they might have buried their dead is that in one small space, an underground cave, there were over forty homo australopithecus bodies. Pretty weird huh? That super cool information is why I want to be just like Dominique. My dream is to change the way people look at science just like he did.

Homo australopithecus

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0e (http://upload.wikimedia.org/)