Alfred S. Romer, professor emeritus of Zoolgy, died Monday evening in Mount Auburn Hospital after a brief illness. He was 79 years old.

Romer, an authority on the 500-million-year history of backboned animals on earth, came to Harvard from the University of Chicago in 1934 as professor of Zoology and curator of Vertebrate Zoology in the Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Romer's research in vertebrate paleontology took him from South Africa to western Argentina to the Permian red-beds of Texas in search of amphibian and reptile fossils.

The Permian period of vertebrate evolution, some 200 to 225 million years ago, was Romer's chief interest for over half a century. Romer had just completed a book mapping the Permian fossil areas in Texas before his death, Ernst Mayr, professor of Zoology, said yesterday.

Enlivened the Subject

Romer's text, "The Vertebrate Body," is the "standard, most widely used one in the field," Mayr said. Romer had "the remarkable ability of making his subject come alive, though comparative anatomy can be somewhat dry," he said.

Bryan Patterson, professor of Vertebrate Paleontology, yesterday praised Romer as a scientist and humanist. "He was a man at home in every area of his subject," Patterson said. "People of his breadth are becoming rare. Yet he always approached his material with the idea foremost in his mind that he was dealing with the remaans of what were once human beings."

Romer was president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1966 and chairman of the board in 1967.