Quark
The quark model was independently proposed by physicists Murray Gell-Mann and George Zweig in 1964. Quarks were introduced as parts of an ordering scheme for hadrons, and there was little evidence for their physical existence until deep inelastic scattering experiments at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center in 1968. Accelerator experiments have provided evidence for all six flavors. The top quark, first observed at Fermilab in 1995, was the last to be discovered.
Quantum chromodynamics
Richard Feynman argued that high energy experiments showed quarks are real particles: he called them "partons" (since they were parts of hadrons). By particles, Feynman meant objects which travel along paths, elementary particles in a field theory.