he found some prehistoric human skulls. Reasoning that the origins of the human species must be in the tropics, in 1887 he joined the Dutch army and arranged to be posted in the Dutch East Indies (the Dutch colony that is now independent Indonesia), to the dismay of his academic colleagues. With his wife and newborn daughter he moved to the colony to search for the missing link in human evolution. (He was unalterably convinced there was only one missing link.) Hominid discoveries Between 1887 and 1895, Dubois searched at potential sites near rivers and in caves, first on the island of Sumatra, then on the Indonesian island of Java. In 1891, Dubois discovered remains of what he described as "a species in between humans and apes". He called his finds Pithecanthropus erectus ("ape-human that stands upright") or Java Man. Today, they are classified as Homo erectus ("human that stands upright"). These were the first specimens of early hominid remains to be found outside of Africa or Europe. During this period Dubois carried out fieldwork at sites such as Sangiran in Central Java and Trinil in East Java. Later years In 1897, the University of Amsterdam awarded Dubois an honorary doctorate in botany and zoology, but he had to wait until 1899 for a professorship. In that year, he was appointed a professor in geology, a function that did not keep him from his research in anatomy. He was also (from 1897 until 1928) keeper of paleontology, geology and mineralogy at Teylers Museum, where he also kept the H. erectus remains. In 1919 he became member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Although the scientific debate slowly began to turn in his favour in the 1920s and 1930s, he died embittered in 1940. He was buried in unconsecrated ground on the 16th of December 1940 in Venlo, "Algemene Begraafplaats", grave number NH2\26\-\BR. Legacy His paleontological collection and scientific archive remain at Naturalis in Leiden. The institute dedicated an exhibition to his findings of Homo erectus in their renovated museum, where the holotype Trinil 2 is on display. According to Pat Shipman, adjunct professor of anthropology at Pennsylvania State University, Dubois was "an extremely influential person in founding paleo-anthropology. He not only found the fossils. He analyzed them in wholly new ways. He pulled human fossils out of this context of racial identification and shoved it into an