'I had no idea there were such things-I was awestruck,' Gould once recalled. When Gould was five years old his father took him to the Hall of Dinosaurs in the American Museum of Natural History, where he first encountered Tyrannosaurus rex.

26 elementary school and graduated from Jamaica High School. Gould and his younger brother Peter were raised in Bayside, a middle-class neighborhood in the northeastern section of Queens. His mother Eleanor was an artist, whose parents were Jewish immigrants living and working in the city's Garment District.

His father Leonard was a court stenographer and a World War II veteran in the United States Navy. Stephen Jay Gould was born in Queens, New York, on September 10, 1941. rex specimen AMNH 5027, American Museum of Natural History, New York City Gould's inspiration to become a paleontologist: T. In April 2000, the US Library of Congress named him a ' Living Legend'. Gould was known by the general public mainly for his 300 popular essays in Natural History magazine, and his numerous books written for both the specialist and non-specialist. He campaigned against creationism and proposed that science and religion should be considered two distinct fields (or ' non-overlapping magisteria') whose authorities do not overlap. In evolutionary theory he opposed strict selectionism, sociobiology as applied to humans, and evolutionary psychology. He also made important contributions to evolutionary developmental biology, receiving broad professional recognition for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny. Most of Gould's empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and Cerion. The theory was contrasted against phyletic gradualism, the popular idea that evolutionary change is marked by a pattern of smooth and continuous change in the fossil record. The theory proposes that most evolution is characterized by long periods of evolutionary stability, infrequently punctuated by swift periods of branching speciation. Gould's most significant contribution to evolutionary biology was the theory of punctuated equilibrium developed with Niles Eldredge in 1972. In 1996, Gould was hired as the Vincent Astor Visiting research professor of biology at New York University, after which he divided his time teaching between there and Harvard.

Gould spent most of his career teaching at Harvard University and working at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. He was one of the most influential and widely read authors of popular science of his generation. Stephen Jay Gould ( / ɡ uː l d/ Septem– May 20, 2002) was an American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science.

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