Why Paleontology?

I grew up on the streets of New York City, in a family of modest means and little formal education, but with a deep love of learning. Like many urban kids who become naturalists, my inspiration came from a great museum - in particular, from the magnificent dinosaurs on display at the American Museum of Natural History. As we all know from Jurassic Park and other sources, dinomania in young children (I was five when I saw my first dinosaur) is not rare - but nearly all children lose the passion, and the desire to be a paleontologist becomes a transient moment between policeman and fireman in a chronology of intended professions. But I persisted and became a professional paleontologist, a student of life's history as revealed by the evidence of fossils (though I ended up working on snails rather than dinosaurs!). Why?

I remained committed to paleontology because I discovered, still as a child, the wonder of one of the greatest transforming ideas ever discovered by science: evolution. I learned that those dinosaurs, and all creatures that have ever lived, are bound together in a grand family tree of physical relationships, and that the rich and fascinating changes of life, through billions of years in geological time, occur by a natural process of evolutionary transformation - "descent with modification," in Darwin's words. I was thrilled to learn that humans had arisen from ape-like ancestors, who had themselves evolved from the tiny mouse-like mammals that had lived in the time of dinosaurs and seemed then so inconspicuous, so unsuccessful, and so unpromising.

Now, at mid-career (I was born in 1941) I remain convinced that I made the right choice, and committed to learn and convey, as much as I can as long as I can, about evolution and the history of life. We can learn a great deal about the process of evolution by studying modern organisms. But history is complex and unpredictable - and principles of evolution (like natural selection) cannot specify the pathway that life's history has actually followed. Paleontology holds the archives of the pathway - the fossil record of past life, with its fascinating history of mass extinctions, periods of rapid change, long episodes of stability, and constantly changing patterns of dominance and diversity. Humans represent just one tiny, largely fortuitous, and late-arising twig on the enormously arborescent bush of life. Paleontology is the study of this grandest of all bushes.