Dr. Bruce M. Latimer

Executive Director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History

Dr. Bruce Latimer has been the executive director of The Cleveland Museum of Natural History since May 9, 2001. He served as the Interim Director from January 2000 to June 2001. Prior to this position, he was Director of Science and Curator and Head of the Department of Physical Anthropology. His other previous positions at the Museum include Supervisor of Collections and Research.

Latimer is the eighth Museum director, succeeding Dr. James King who retired in December 2000.

As the executive director, Latimer took over a number of major projects that were either started or in the planning stage. The construction of the Shafran Planetarium was completed and opened in mid-January 2002. The Ralph Perkins II Memorial Wildlife Center and Woods Garden was renovated and open in December 2002 and renovations to the Smead Discovery Center were completed and opened in April 2003.

Over the past year, Latimer has been working with the Board of Trustees, the Development Department and various Museum committees on a major capital plan to renovate and enlarge some exhibit areas on the Museum’s first floor, upgrade and relocated the front entrance, add an enclosed parking facility and other enhancements to the first- and classroom-level floors.

In addition to his Museum duties, Latimer has directed the Biological Anthropology Program, Department of Anatomy at Case Western Reserve University, School of Medicine in Cleveland. He has been associate professor in Department of Anatomy at CWRUs School of Medicine from July 1989 to the present. Latimer is also an adjunct associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Cleveland State University and Kent State University's School of Biomedical Sciences. He continues to teach to the extent that his schedule allows.

During his Museum career, Latimer has earned an international reputation as a physical anthropologist and is recognized as an authority on the evolution of human locomotion. His research has helped shape our present understanding of the evolutionary processes that led to the ability of humans to walk upright on two feet.

Latimer is among a group of scientists who analyzed the famous "Lucy" fossil skeleton. Her 3.2 million-year-old bones were discovered in Ethiopia by a Museum team in 1974.

In addition, Latimer has worked with national and international scientific teams at sites worldwide. Paleoanthropological and archaeological expeditions have taken him to Tabun Cave in Israel in 2000, the Middle Awash Valley in Ethiopia from 1992 to 1998 and Laetoli, Tanzania, in 1995 and 1996. In 1999, he was part of an international team that announced the discovery and identification of a new species of early human ancestor, Australopithecus garhi.

In the spring of 2002, Latimer hired Dr. Yohannes Haile-Selassie, an outstanding paleontologist from the University of California at Berkeley, to head the Museum’s Physical Anthropology Department. Latimer said, "He is brilliant and one of the greatest human fossil finders in this field today."

By 2004, under the leadership of Latimer, Haile-Selassie was conducting a paleoanthropological survey for the Museum in the Mille-Chifra-Kasa Gita area of the Afar Region and located 14 new fossil bearing localities. One of the most important discoveries thus far is a partial skeleton of a hominid that is probably around 3.8 to 4 million years old, based on associated animal remains found. Latimer and Haile-Selassie announced the discovery in Ethiopia on March 5, 2005. "If these dates prove to be accurate, the new partial skeleton would fall on the evolutionary tree between Ardipithecus ramidus and Australopitecus afarensis," explained Latimer.

Latimer’s fields of interest are biological anthropology, Plio-Pleistocene hominid evolution, comparative primate anatomy and the biomechanics of the locomotor system.

Latimer received a bachelor’s degree in Anthropology from the University of Arizona in June 1975; a master’s degree in Physical Anthropology from Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio in June 1978; and a Ph.D. in Biomedical Sciences from Kent State University in Kent, Ohio in August 1988.