Chris Beard is a Kansas University distinguished Foundation Professor of ecology and evolutionary biology, and a senior curator at the Biodiversity Institute.

Some of Chris Beard’s earliest memories are of a childhood fascination with animals — farm animals, wild animals, it almost didn’t matter.

From his father, a “kind of perpetual student” as Beard describes him, Beard started receiving some “really strange bedtime stories” about animals long gone, preserved only as fossils.

“That’s when I found out that there were some extinct animals even more interesting than those alive today,” Beard said.

As he got older his interests were briefly subsumed by sports, girls and the obligatory pre-med courses. But in college he rediscovered his early fascination with animals and fossils and went into paleontology, a field that has taken him to Libya, Myanmar, China and, now, Lawrence.

In April Beard joined the Kansas University department of ecology and evolution as one of the university’s first distinguished Foundation Professors.

The goal of KU’s Foundation Professor initiative is to lure to the university scholars recognized as being at the top of their fields. Beard, with a MacArthur “genius” award and more than 100 peer-reviewed articles under his belt, fit the description.

KU recruited Beard from the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, Pa., where he was the chairman of vertebrate paleontology. Beard’s wife, Sandra Olsen, will also join KU in August as a professor of museum studies and a senior curator at the Biodiversity Institute.

Chris Haufler, chair of KU’s ecology and evolutionary biology department, said the search for an established paleontologist began after longtime and well-loved paleontology professor Larry Martin died in 2013.

“When Larry Martin died, we realized that we lost a significant figure in paleontology at KU,” Haufler said. “We all basically came to the conclusion that the best way to do that (rebuild the program) is to bring in a senior individual that has the credibility and name recognition to bring visibility to KU.”

Beard is known throughout the world of paleontology for his work on the development of early primates. He was part of a team that discovered one of the oldest higher primates found to date. He also wrote the book “The Hunt for the Dawn Monkey: Unearthing the Origins of Monkeys, Apes and Humans,” which chronicles the emergence and discovery of the first the first anthropoids.

Beard said one of the remaining questions “my team and I are kind of obsessed with” is the point at which early monkeys emerged in Africa from Asia — an event that took place millions of years ago.

“They got there surprisingly early, and had to get across open water to get there,” Beard said. “It’s a shocking discovery we’ve made in just the last couple of years.”

The mystery of how it happened Beard will now be trying to unravel at KU.