American paleontologist
Wann Langston Jr. (1921 – April 7, 2013) was an American paleontologist and professor at the University of Texas at Austin.
Langston worked on a number of different reptiles and amphibians in his long career, beginning with the 1950 description (with J. Willis Stovall) of the theropod dinosaur "Acrocanthosaurus". Langston was hired by the National Museum of Canada in 1954 to replace Charles M. Sternberg, and worked in western Canada and on Prince Edward Island until 1962. One of his major finds, with Loris Russell, was the rediscovery of Sternberg's Scabby Butte "Pachyrhinosaurus" bonebed. Langston, along with a small team of fieldworkers, excavated the Scabby Butte bonebed in 1957, securing several skulls and several hundred bones there. He then went on in 1963 to the University of Texas, where in 1969 he became the second director of the Vertebrate Paleontology Laboratory, where he worked on many projects, including work on Cretaceous vertebrates from Big Bend National Park. Finds that he and his students worked on include the giant pterosaur "Quetzalcoatlus" and a variety of Permian and Mesozoic reptiles. He retired in 1986, but continued to be active in the field. In 2007, Langston was the twentieth recipient of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology's A. S. Romer-G. G. Simpson Medal, the highest honor of the society.
Langston died of natural causes a few days after a Geological Society of America symposium held in his honor at the South Central Geological Society of America meeting in Austin, Texas.
Animals named by Langston include the carcharodontosaurid theropod "Acrocanthosaurus" (1950), the hadrosauroid dinosaur "Lophorhothon" (1960), the microsaur "Carrolla" (1986), and the azdarchid pterosaurs "Wellnhopterus" and "Quetzalcoatlus lawsoni" (the latter two named posthumously in 2021). The mesoeucrocodylians "Langstonia", "Akanthosuchus langstoni," and "Albertochampsa langstoni"; theropod "Saurornitholestes langstoni"; pachycephalosaur "Texacephale langstoni"; and pterosaur "Radiodactylus langstoni" were named for him.
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