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i Oral History Center University of California The Bancroft Library Berkeley, California Caution and Care: The Evolution of Paleontology at the University of California Museum of Paleontology: Volume II Interviews with David Archibald Mike Novacek Annalisa Berta Lowell Dingus Marisol Montellano Zhe-Xi Luo Charles Marshall Nancy Simmons Don Lofgren David Polly Jessica Theodor Greg Wilson Mark Goodwin Interviews conducted by Paul Burnett in 2015 and 2016 Copyright © 2017 by The Regents of the University of California ii Table of Contents Interview History by Paul Burnett iii Introduction by Jason A. Lillegraven v David Archibald 1 Mike Novacek 23 Annalisa Berta 43 Lowell Dingus 69 Marisol Montellano 89 Zhe-Xi Luo 113 Charles Marshall 135 Nancy Simmons 163 Don Lofgren 189 David Polly 215 Jessica Theodor 241 Greg Wilson 265 Mark Goodwin 289 iii Interview History The Bill Clemens/UCMP oral history project has been several years in the making. Historian Sam Redman first proposed to do a history of members of the University of California Museum of Paleontology in 2011, specifically to interview Dr. William Clemens and a number of his graduate students. The concept behind the project was novel and important: to document with long-form oral history of successive cohorts of students who were advised by a single scholar, while at the same time interviewing the scholar in depth about the evolution of his field, as well as the key transformations in the institutions in which he played significant roles. UCMP Associate Director Mark Goodwin was the fulcrum in organizing the project, from fundraising to arranging for interviews with Bill’s students from all over the world. My first session with Bill was December 18, 2014, and my last was March 10, 2016. One of the factors contributing to the length of time spanning these sessions was the fact that Bill was caring for his wife Dorothy “Dot” Clemens while she battled cancer. There was some hope that she would live to see the project completed, but she ultimately passed before its completion. After a time, Bill resumed the project, in tribute not only to UCMP, his colleagues, and students, but also to her memory, as Dorothy Clemens was deeply committed to ensuring that Bill’s oral history was documented for the ages. Several themes are explored in the interview. There is a longstanding concern in the history of science with the ways in which scientists establish and maintain their credibility within and beyond their communities. By the 1950s, the queen of the sciences was physics, and the public was consumed by the promise and peril of high technology, from the splitting of the atom to the electronic consumer items in the shops. In the public mind, paleontology perhaps had more in common with the 19th-century field sciences than with the growing domains of digital computing or molecular biology. When Bill Clemens started his undergraduate work UC Berkeley Department of Paleontology at the beginning of the 1950s, the modern evolutionary synthesis in biology, which linked laboratory research in genetics to field studies, statistical analysis, paleontology, and Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, had only just been worked out before the war. The helical structure of DNA was announced in Bill’s junior year. In other words, Bill began his career at the beginning of a new common cause in science — the evolution of species and their adaptations to changing environments — with cascades of new questions to follow in the decades to come. The drama of paleontology is often heightened by the interest in the gigantic specimens. Owing in part to the Evolutionary Synthesis, the paleontologists of Bill’s cohort were interested, not just in the structures of fossils specimens themselves, but in where and how they lived in relation to one another. To get at some of these ecological questions, these students turned to the very small microvertebrates which could be found with a new technique of screenwashing, which is basically sifting for tiny fossils. What they found in the Lance Formation in Wyoming in one season equaled the number of fossils of their kind ever discovered up to that point. The field was moving away from the romance of the big dinosaurs and toward a more detailed understanding of evolutionary relationships among specimens and of the developmental characteristics that might tell the scientists something about how the creatures lived. iv It’s important not to understate the importance of this scale and extent of fossil collection. The organized work of Clemens’ generation and the one that followed made possible newer types of data-intensive computerized research on paleontology, evolutionary biology, and climate change, areas far beyond the classification of fossils based on their structure. In fact, it is not uncommon for doctoral students today to conduct their research entirely with collected specimens in a laboratory, although Bill might not recommend this exclusive a course of study. It is here that we come to an important focus of this history, which incorporates the second volume of this project: the thirteen interviews with Bill’s graduate students and the current leader of the UC Museum of Paleontology, Charles Marshall. Bill and his students are witnesses to the changes in the field of paleontology, the increasing use of computing to process large quantities of data, and the field’s involvement in the most pressing questions of the last four decades: the resilience of species, the interdependence of organisms, and the consequences of a changing climate on the abilities of organisms to adapt to both sudden and gradual changes. These questions are also a reflection of my initial interest in credibility in science. Through these interviews, we see how paleontology has adapted itself to a changing scientific climate, contending with the introduction of new species of ideas such as the asteroid-impact hypothesis for the extinction of most dinosaur species at the end of the Cretaceous, or through the adoption of sophisticated mathematical analyses of the surface structure of mammalian teeth to answer questions about the evolution of a particular species’ diet millions of years ago. Scientists struggle for credibility, and one way of doing so is to hybridize their research techniques and programs with the dominant sciences of the day, such as molecular and structural biology. The Department of Paleontology’s integration with the Department of Integrative Biology at UC Berkeley was part of a larger effort to cross-fertilize ideas and techniques from different but related disciplines that focus on evolutionary processes. “Interdisciplinarity” had an early home here at Berkeley and especially at UCMP, long before Integrative Biology was founded in the 1990s. One result of this integration is that the UC Museum of Paleontology has once again assumed a worldwide leadership role in the conduct of cutting-edge research, though it has long led the field of mammalian paleontology. On a more human level, you will find in these pages that the engines of research and innovation are fueled by human virtues as much as intellect. Bill and Dot’s patience and empathy for Bill’s students, as they navigated the challenges of graduate school and the dust and heat of the field, are well documented, as is Bill’s curiosity, meticulousness, patience and care with which he draws his scientific conclusions. It is surely a mark of his influence that his students have taken up his approach by using new techniques and evidence, carefully tested, to gradually move their respective fields forward increment by increment. Paul Burnett Berkeley, CA, 2017 v Introduction, by Jason A. Lillegraven, the first graduate student of Bill Clemens Jason A. Lillegraven Arts & Sciences Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Geology/Geophysics and Zoology/Physiology University of Wyoming, Laramie, Wyoming, USA Parallels — Getting a secure start on a career in science is always a challenge. In the early 1960s, both Assistant Professor William Alvin Clemens (‘Bill’) and the then recent master’s-degree holder Lillegraven (‘Jay’) were in remarkably parallel settings—even though immensely separated in terms of attained knowledge about their common interests in paleontology of the Mammalia. The lives of those two academic beginners converged via U.S. mail in September 1963, followed by their first face-to-face contact in the late summer of 1964 in Lawrence, Kansas. I arrived on the KU Jayhawk scene following study in South Dakota to become Bill’s first student to seek the PhD degree. Correspondence — Ever since those days, I have saved almost all of our correspondence—now totaling hundreds of richly informative documents. The diversity of our exchange ranges across broad paleontological concepts and taxonomic details, news of our personal lives, commentaries on local settings, field work, friendly and absurd insults, surprises as recognized through our microscopes, and views about the marvels of organic evolution. Bill’s wife Dorothy (‘Dot’) regularly joined in the fun with her own perspectives. And yes, of course all those items of correspondence will be properly archived and made accessible to the professional community. Extractions — In preparation for this brief contribution to Bill’s extensive oral history, I extracted the bulk of our correspondence from my file folders and read it all again. I did so because of the realization that I am in a unique position in having coexisted in person with Bill for three wonderful years (academic years 1964–’65 through 1966–’67), when both of us were rank beginners in our university roles. Although refreshing those memories from 1963 to today was rewarding in itself, my focus today is to answer the question, ‘How did Bill do as a neophyte professor in guiding his first doctoral student?’ In terms of reliability of my analysis, recognize that this was my first experience with an academic advisor who was so young.