Perhaps no other body part reveals as much about an animal’s relationship to its environment, says evolutionary biologist Otto Stenberg of the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Prof. Björn Kurtén, born 100 years ago, was one of the world’s finest evolutionary paleontologists. In his native Finland, a country with almost no fossils, he created a paleontology tradition. He studied the great Ice Age mammals, the mammoth and the bison, the sabre-toothed tiger and the cave bear, and he built a picture of their origins and patterns of life. He combined meticulous attention to detail with freshness of thinking, and won awards as a scientist and as a writer.

He sought to capture in novels the feeling of life for the people of ancient times.