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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

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

(Growing up in central Pennsylvania, I actually went fossil-hunting on highway cuts about the same time, not sure it was this same stratum— I found some nice mollusks, no groundbreaking transitional vertebrates)