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Seated for Neil Shubin’s Gould Award plenary, and excited to find out once and for all whether fish are real

“When I took evolutionary biology for the first time, it was like wearing a new pair of glasses”

Shubin says it’s both the best of times and the worst of times for science, citing unprecedented methodological advances, and both the current federal administration and the broader information environment in which we work

And for a response to those challenges, Shubin looks back to starting out in the field, as a TA for Stephen Jay Gould

Shubin recounts his decision to focus on the tetrapod transition to land, and the plan of paleontology to look for fossils that might capture that transition

Basically, at one point in the stratigraphy we have lobe-finned fishes, a little higher (more recently) we have terrestrial tetrapods… what’s in between?

Shubin’s early-90s startup funding was enough to cover Pennsylvania turnpike tolls (LOL) to get him and his students to Devonian rocks in the “Catskills Formation” exposed by highway cuts

When the Catskill formation didn’t yield what Shubin was looking for, he zeroed in on another Devonian formation in the Canadian Arctic, which he only found described in passing in an oil/gas exploration report

(Great old school digging-in-the-library story there)

Some photos of truly desolate field-camp sites in the course of this Arctic hunt, tents lost in the wind, casual mention of polar bear hazards