🧵 Twitter Thread

I still cannot grasp that he is gone.
Dr. Mark Norell remains, for me, the same pioneering scientist who stood at the very heart of the most momentous discoveries about dino-bird evolution since the late twentieth century to this day.

He was the same kind-hearted scholar who, in the years before PDFs became widespread, repeatedly mailed hard copies of his own papers from the American Museum of Natural History to me in Iran.

A man who dreamed that one day he would be able to come to Iran to explore dinosaur fossils; but alas, harsh and unkind times were not merciful to us, nor to him, in this sorrowful turn of fate.
His legacy will forever endure, but the loss to all who knew him is immeasurable.