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Generations: Tracking American Paleontology and Anatomy Over 17 Decades

2020; Wiley; Volume: 303; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1002/ar.24375

1932-8494

Peter Dodson,

Paleontology and Evolutionary Biology

The Big Bang tells us the story of the origin of our universe beginning in a flash of light some 13.8 billion years ago. Genesis tells the story of the origin of humankind beginning in a flash of light perhaps 6,000 years ago—or perhaps not. The Gospel of Matthew tells us the story of the origin of Jesus, 42 generations from Abraham to Jesus, the light of the world. Luke tells an even more expansive story, 77 generations from God to Adam down to Jesus. Humans, scientists no less than common folk, love a good story, and if it involves origins, so much the better. We desire to know where we came from and where we are going. I am no exception. This article is the story of my origins, specifically my academic origins. My academic story goes back only seven generations, but best of all, I can trace it forward beyond me another four generations, making of me an academic Job. When I began my career, I was a callow youth with no interest in “history.” I was eager to soak up all of the foundational knowledge and current research that I was capable of absorbing. I recollect (with embarrassment) the first time I took off the bookshelf a new book, “The Meaning of Fossils,” by Martin J. S. Rudwick (Rudwick, 1972). As I perused the pages, I wrinkled my nose in disgust and thrust it back onto the shelf. There was no paleontology to be gleaned from that tome—only history! When as a sapling I was exposed to history, I did not appreciate it for what it was. As an eager undergraduate at the University of Ottawa, I had the wonderful privilege in 1967 of working at the National Museum of Canada during the summer before my senior year. Not only did I rub shoulders all summer with curator Dale A. Russell, heir to the great trove of dinosaur fossils collected by Lawrence Lambe and the fabled Sternberg family, C. M. Sternberg (1885–1981) himself used to come in once a week or so. Born in 1885, Sternberg was then a sprightly 82. His father, C. H. Sternberg (1850–1943), collected for E. D. Cope (1840–1897), the Philadelphia Quaker, who was a great rival to Yale's O. C. Marsh (1831–1899). One of my keenest regrets today is that I never took a photograph of or with Charlie Sternberg—no selfies in those days! When I attended my first Society of Vertebrate Paleontology meeting at Yale in 1967, Alfred Sherwood Romer (1894–1973), George Gaylord Simpson (1902–1984), E. C. Olson (1910–1993), and E. H. Colbert (1905–2001) were in attendance, among many others. Thus, I walked with history, and indeed was in awe of such luminaries, but still did not fully appreciate what a privilege it was. Romer, Colbert, and Olson were outstandingly approachable, and easy to talk to; Simpson was much less so. Today I marvel that when I began in paleontology the revered senior members of our profession dated from the end of the 19th century and the first decade in the 20th century. Today's neophytes are not so lucky—it is my generation who are seniors, for better or for worse. Not long ago Kevin Padian mused to me, “Peter, remember those old farts when we started? Well, we are the old farts now!” Sad but true. Academics do not spring fresh from the brow of Jove. Mentorship is incredibly important in the sciences as in most human endeavors. I was blessed to have not one but three mentors. The first of these was Dale A. Russell, then the young curator of fossil vertebrates at the National Museum of Canada (now the Canadian Museum of Nature). (I was saddened by Dale's recent death Dec. 21, 2019, just short of his 82nd birthday). I was an undergraduate at the University of Ottawa, and Dale took me under his wing. He provided me employment in the fossil preparation lab at the museum in the summer of 1967, the summer before my senior year in University. This wonderful experience, punctuated by visits by Charlie Sternberg and visiting paleontologist Wann Langston, Jr. (1921–2013), confirmed my desire for a career in dinosaur paleontology. Russell's Ph.D. was with E. H. Colbert at Columbia University (American Museum of Natural History), and his postdoctoral fellowship was with John Ostrom at Yale University, so his genealogy dovetails nicely with my own! My second mentor was Richard C. Fox at the University of Alberta, where I did my master's degree. Richard Fox is a crusty, cantankerous, brilliant paleontologist who became expert on the Cretaceous and Paleogene record of mammals and lower vertebrates of western Canada after taking his position in Edmonton in 1966. My third mentor, my Doktorvater, was John H. Ostrom (1928–2005) of Yale University, arguably the author of the modern dinosaur, with his discoveries of the marvelous leaping “lizard,” Deinonychus, and of the link between theropod dinosaurs and birds. Ostrom was heir to the legacy of O. C. Marsh, the great 19th-century paleontologist who founded the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and filled it with a legendary collection of Mesozoic and Cenozoic fossil vertebrates. At Yale, I met any number of interesting characters, including among others Robert Bakker, Jim Farlow, Phil Gingerich, Richard Kay, and Jeffrey Laitman, the distinguished senior associate editor of this journal. Jeff and I studied anatomy at Yale University School of Medicine, where we faced each other morning after morning across our cadaver. Another important intellectual influence on me at Yale was Keith Thomson, then a young fish paleontologist, subsequently Dean of Yale Graduate School, and later president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia and director of the Museum of Zoology at Oxford University. I completed my Ph.D. in 1974 and came directly to the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, where I have passed my days from then until now as an instructor of veterinary gross anatomy, as well as of paleontology in the Department of Geology (now, Earth and Environmental Science). I never dreamed that a single audited human anatomy course in the final year of my graduate program could lead to a career in veterinary gross anatomy. I always tell my students to expect the unexpected; that is to say, just because their degrees come from a geology department, it does not necessarily follow that they will find their future employment in such a situation. Most people claim but a single mentor. I claim the author's privilege to list three, and I do so out of gratitude, although I have only one Doktorvater. As I trace my academic genealogy, I can draw an orthogenetic line back to mid-19th century Philadelphia, the birthplace of American vertebrate paleontology. In contrast, if I were to start back then and work my way forward, a very large number of separate lineages could be traced, only one of which arrives at moi. I choose a simpler course. I studied with John Ostrom at Yale. Ostrom attended Columbia University Graduate School and studied with E. H. Colbert (1905–2001), completing his Ph.D. there in 1960. Ned Colbert was a curator of fossil vertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History for 40 years. He exerted a great influence on my young life, as he was the author of the book that I received from my parents, The Dinosaur Book (Colbert, 1945). This book absolutely inflamed my desire to become a dinosaur paleontologist, a commitment that was firm by age 11. Later I devoured his books Dinosaurs: Their Discovery and Their World (Colbert, 1961) and Men and Dinosaurs: The Search in Field and Laboratory (Colbert, 1968). From these books, I learned about the fossil themselves, the history of collecting, geographic scope, and everything else about the field I yearned to enter. Another thing I came to appreciate was the importance of photographs of people. I was struck by a photo in one of Ned's book showing himself along with Dale Russell and John Ostrom. This inspired me to capture four generations of my lineage (Colbert, Ostrom, Dodson, and Weishampel) in a photo taken in 1987 (Fig. 1). Thus, it slowly dawned on me that history is important. One of the great thrills of my later life was getting to know Ned and his gracious wife, Margaret, at their retirement home in Flagstaff. His signature on my copy of The Dinosaur Book is one I will always treasure (Fig. 2). Colbert came to Columbia University to study with Henry Fairfield Osborn but switched his mentorship to W. K. Gregory. William King Gregory (1876–1970) was a comparative vertebrate anatomist, paleontologist, and anthropologist, and altogether a man of vast scholarly knowledge. One of his most notable students was Alfred Sherwood Romer at Columbia University and the American Museum of Natural History. Many academic lineages trace through Romer, who began his academic career at the University of Chicago in 1923 and then transferred to Harvard, where he remained until his death in 1973. Many more were influenced by his superb books, particularly Vertebrate Paleontology (Romer, 1966) and The Vertebrate Body (1970). I cannot claim membership in the clade of Romer students, but I absolutely belong in the cohort of those who were influenced by Romer. Gregory was a New Yorker by birth, and attended Columbia University, where in due course he became Henry Fairfield Osborn's research assistant, from whom he received his Ph.D. in 1910. Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857–1935) was a larger than life figure to the manor born. He attended Princeton University, studied in England with F. M. Balfour in Cambridge and with T. H. Huxley in London and received his Sc.D. in paleontology in 1880. He was a professor of comparative anatomy at Princeton from 1883 until he was called to Columbia University as a professor of zoology. He is known as the founder of the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology at the American Museum of Natural History, an up-to-then sleepy institution founded in 1869. He assembled a superb crew of paleontologists including Barnum Brown (discoverer of Tyrannosaurus rex, Ankylosaurus, and a great cast of dinosaurs from Alberta); Roy Chapman Andrews, leader of the Central Asian Expeditions to Mongolia (Protoceratops, Psittacosaurus, and Velociraptor); and later W. D. Matthews; anatomists (W. K. Gregory) and artists (Charles R. Knight). He sent expeditions first to Wyoming, then Montana, then Alberta, then Mongolia and India. As president of the board of trustees of the museum from 1908 to 1933, he oversaw the construction of the magnificent edifice that stands today on the western edge of Central Park, and he saw to it that the museum was filled with treasures from the natural world. He recognized the value of skeletal mounts of dinosaurs, an activity absolutely scorned and forbidden by O. C. Marsh at Yale. The iconic rearing, tail-dragging mount of Tyrannosaurus familiar to generations of museum visitors lasted from 1915 to 1992. Who inspired Osborn? Edward Drinker Cope. Thus, the story returns to Philadelphia. Edward Drinker Cope (1840–1897) was one of the great paleontologists of the 19th century. The son of a wealthy Quaker businessman, Alfred Cope, Edward was truly a prodigy, brilliant, precocious and furiously productive, publishing some 1,400 papers in his relatively brief lifetime. He was impatient of formal schooling and left the Westtown School at age 15. His father tried and failed to make a respectable self-sufficient farmer out of him, but he showed little inclination for anything other than science. He took classes at the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied comparative anatomy with Joseph Leidy but took no formal degree. He went to Europe for a year in 1863 and visited major museums there, meeting and befriending O. C. Marsh in Berlin. Upon returning to the United States, he taught at Haverford College for a year, but found that teaching interfered with his research, so he gave that up. He continued to publish papers, especially on New Jersey fossils and later fossil vertebrates from the American West, including the Cretaceous great marine reptile from Kansas, Elasmosaurus, the dinosaurs Monoclonius, Camarasaurus, and Coelophysis and many other fossils as well as living vertebrates. He possessed a famously impetuous personality and unfortunately is remembered in history as much as for his legendary feud with O. C. Marsh at Yale as for his contributions to science. He exhausted his family fortune with bad mining investments, and during the last years of his life, he became a professor of paleontology at the University of Pennsylvania. Cope's mentor was Joseph Leidy (1823–1891), a man of immense erudition (Fig. 3). His biographer described him as “the last man who knew everything” (Warren, 1998). He distinguished himself in a number of fields, including protozoology, parasitology, paleontology, entomology, botany, and anatomy. He is more or less sui generis. His father was a hatter and wanted his son to be a sign painter. He received medical training at the University of Pennsylvania, graduating in 1844. He practiced medicine for 3 years but was much more interested in research than in patient care. At age 22, he was elected to membership in the Academy of Natural Sciences and served as a curator there from 1846 until his death in 1891. By 1853, he was a professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, where he taught for 38 years. He was named professor of natural history at Swarthmore College in 1870 and taught there twice a week for 14 years. He published the first American textbook on human anatomy in 1861, which was the standard anatomical text in the United States for decades. He was a founding member of the National Academy of Science in 1863. In 1884, he founded the Department of Biology at the University of Pennsylvania. He was president of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia from 1881 until his death a decade later. In 1885, he was elected president of the Wagner Free Institute of Science in Philadelphia. He was the first president of the American Association of Anatomists (1888–1889). In spite of all these distractions, he published 800 papers in his lifetime. As a paleontologist, he described the first American dinosaurs, notably Trachodon, Troodon, Deinodon, and Palaeoscincus in 1856 and Hadrosaurus foulkii in 1858. As a parasitologist, he discovered the nematode parasite, Trichinella spiralis, literally in his breakfast bacon. This is the cause of a sometimes fatal disease in humans, trichinosis. As a public health measure, he was the first to recommend that pork be well cooked. I am proud to claim the legacy of Joseph Leidy. Philadelphia was the birthplace of American paleontology and medical science. Leidy has been called the father of American paleontology (my student, Cathy Forster, once posed the question: “Who was the mother?”). Once again, Philadelphia is an important center both in paleontology and in biomedical research spread across many universities, colleges, and museums. Thus as I trace my academic pedigree down from Leidy, it begins in Philadelphia in the mid-19th century, shifts to New York from the late 19th century to the mid-20th century, rests briefly in New Haven, and then returns to Philadelphia in 1974 and remains there for me personally. However, Leidy's lineage did not end in Philadelphia. Evolutionary success is measured in progeny, but especially in fertility of the F2 and subsequent generations. I have exercised demographic prudence with respect to my biological fecundity but in terms of my academic fecundity, I have been much more profligate, with a score of successful Ph.D. students. I could trace a large number of academic lineages through my score of students, but for narrative purposes, I shall adopt an orthogenetic perspective. I could not be prouder of the collective accomplishments of my students. All of my students have been academically productive, but I shall focus this discussion of generations on my first-born, my first student, David B. Weishampel (Ph.D. University of Pennsylvania 1981), who was professor of cell biology and anatomy at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine until his retirement in 2016. David has had a terrific career (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/fae/documents/CVDBW.pdf). He is senior editor of the authoritative reference source The Dinosauria (Weishampel et al. 1990; Weishampel et al., 2004), coauthor of the leading textbook on dinosaurs (Fastovsky and Weishampel, 2016), namer of the dinosaurs Niobrarasaurus colei, Orodromeus makelai, Zalmoxes robustus, and Ajkaceratops kozmai, and honoree of Penelopognathus weishampeli. David has mentored a number of successful Ph.D. students, the latest of whom is my academic grandson, Ali Nabavizadeh (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins, 2014; Nabavizadeh, this volume), who is currently assistant professor of biomedical sciences at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University in Camden, NJ (Fig. 4). David's first student is my academic grandson, Larry Witmer (Ph.D. Johns Hopkins University 1992), who has been especially fecund. Apart from an early stint at New York College of Osteopathic Medicine (NYCOM) Larry has passed his entire distinguished career as an anatomist and paleontologist at Ohio University Heritage College of Osteopathic Medicine. Larry, who is proud to characterize himself as an anatomist as well as a paleontologist, has become an expert on modern computer-based techniques of anatomical imaging, especially CT-scanning and 3D reconstruction of skulls of living animals, archosaurs, and dinosaurs. He does not eschew scalpel and forceps either. He and his students have investigated soft tissue anatomy, including brains, vascular systems, circulatory systems, and respiratory systems in the heads of mammals, birds, reptiles, and dinosaurs. He has produced 10 Ph.D.s. Larry, although only 13 years my junior, has fully embraced social media, unlike this dinosaur, the present author. The Witmer Lab has an exemplary website (https://people.ohio.edu/witmerl/lab.htm) replete with downloadable PDFs on a wide range of subjects, is on FaceBook and hosts its own YouTube channel. Witmer's highly productive career is laid out in excellent detail on his website. He is well represented in the current volume (Cost et al., this volume; Holliday et al., this volume; Porter and Witmer, this volume). Among Witmer's students, the most prolific is Casey Holliday (Ph.D., Ohio University, 2006). Casey, my academic great-grandson, has established his own productive laboratory at the University of Missouri School of Medicine (Holliday et al., this volume). He continues the exploration of the cranial anatomy of lizards, crocodilians, and dinosaurs with emphasis on bone, cartilage, muscle, and tendon. Well trained by his mentor, he has his own informative website (https://hollidaylab.com). He has already produced several Ph.D.s. Henry Tsai (https://www.missouristate.edu/bms/htsai.aspx), my academic great-great-grandson, graduated from the Holliday lab with his Ph.D. in 2015. After several years of postdoctoral work at Brown University, Henry has recently (2018) taken a position as a gross anatomist in the Department of Biomedical Sciences at Missouri State University in Springfield. Although he is certifiably an anatomist and paleontologist, Henry has strayed from the head region favored by Witmer and Holliday and has undertaken study of the evolution of locomotion by studying vertebrate limbs, joints, and kinematics. In following the fecund lineage of the Dodson–Weishampel–Witmer lineage, I do not mean to downplay the accomplishments of my other doctoral children, all of whom have significant achievements of which I can boast. My students have generally followed one of three distinct career paths: in museums and research institutes; in biomedical departments in medical schools; and in universities or colleges with either undergraduate or graduate teaching responsibilities. Several of my students occupy important positions in the world of museums and research institutions. Anthony Fiorillo (Ph.D. U Penn 1989) is Vice President of Research and Collections and Chief Curator at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas. Tony is an expert on the geology and dinosaur paleontology of Alaska. Matt Lamanna (Ph.D. U Penn 2004) is associate curator and principal dinosaur researcher at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, and thus custodian of one of the greatest collections of dinosaurs in the world. Matt has an insatiable appetite for fieldwork, with predoctoral experience in Montana, Egypt, Argentina, and China. He is currently working in Antarctica among other places. You Hailu (Ph.D. U Penn 2002) is a senior researcher at the fabled Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology (IVPP) of the Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing (Wang et al., this volume). He has described a steady stream of exciting new Chinese dinosaurs. He has already supervised two Ph.D. students (Ya-Ming Wang and Jing-Tao Yang) from China University of the Geosciences in Beijing and will soon have a third from the IVPP (Qian-Nan Zhang). More recent students in the museum world include Andrew McDonald (Ph.D. UPenn 2012), curator at the Western Science Center, Hemet, CA; and Steven Jasinski (Ph.D. UPenn 2018), Curator of Geology and Paleontology at the State Museum of Pennsylvania, Harrisburg. Several of my students have pursued careers in medical gross anatomy. Besides David Weishampel (see above), these include Susan Dawson (Ph.D. UPenn 1993), a veterinary gross anatomist and cetacean researcher at Atlantic Veterinary College, University of Prince Edward Island; and Emma Schachner (Ph.D. UPenn 2010), who after several years of postdoctoral fellowships has set up her own research and training laboratory at Louisiana State University New Orleans School of Medicine, where she is assistant professor of cell biology and anatomy (Schachner et al., this volume). Cathy Forster (Ph.D. UPenn 1990) began her career as an anatomist at Stony Brook University and produced one Ph.D. while there: Kristi Curry-Rogers, currently a professor of biology and geology at Macalester College, St. Paul, MN. Cathy is currently professor of biology at George Washington University, where she has had several more students: Karen Poole, an instructor in anatomy at the Renaissance School of Medicine, Stony Brook University (Karen was an undergraduate advisee of mine at the University of Pennsylvania.); and Dominic White, a researcher in paleobiology at the Smithsonian. My student Brandon Hedrick (Ph.D. UPenn 2015) completed his NSF postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University and spent a year as a post doc at Oxford University before becoming assistant professor of anatomy at Louisiana State University School of Medicine in New Orleans in summer 2019 (Hedrick et al., this volume; Hedrick and Dodson, this volume). The third career path for my students is an academic teaching career. Allison Tumarkin-Deratzian (Ph.D. UPenn 2003) is an associate professor of instruction, vice-chair, and undergraduate adviser in the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at Temple University. Allison mentored Jennifer Anné, a master's student at Temple University, who completed her Ph.D. at the University of Manchester in 2015. My other students teach in colleges and thus do not have the opportunity to mentor Ph.D. students: William B. Gallagher (Ph.D. UPenn 1990), who is adjunct professor of paleontology at Rider University after retiring from a lengthy career at the New Jersey State Museum; Michael J. Balsai (Ph.D. UPenn 2001), assistant professor of instruction, Department of Biology, Temple University; Jerry Harris (Ph.D. UPenn 2004), associate professor and director of paleontology, Dixie State University, St. George, Utah; Barbara Grandstaff, (Ph.D. UPenn 2006), lecturer of anatomy in the School of Veterinary Medicine, University of Pennsylvania; Merrilee Guenther (Ph.D. UPenn 2007), Elmhurst College; Kyo Tanoue (Ph.D. UPenn 2008), University of Fukuoka; and Eric Morschhauser (Ph. D. UPenn 2012), Indiana University of Pennsylvania. My advisee Liguo Li completed her Ph.D. at Drexel University in 2019 and is currently lecturing in anatomy at Ohio University. Finally, I must mention my two current and final Ph.D. students, Aja Carter and Erynn Johnson, both of whom are scheduled to complete their Ph.D.s this year. I have trained but a single postdoctoral fellow, but what a splendid one! Anusuya Chinsamy-Turan (Fig. 5) earned her Ph.D. at the University of Witwatersrand in 1991, spent 2002–2004 as an NSF postdoctoral fellow in my lab at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, and then returned to her native South Africa to take up a position in the Department of Zoology at the University of Cape Town, where she is currently professor. She is an expert on the histology of fossil and living vertebrates, author of four books, was named South African Woman of the Year in 2005 and operates a thriving lab in which she trains numerous students (Angst et al., this volume). Happily, she continues to collaborate with my students, especially Allison Tumarkin-Deratzian and Anthony Fiorillo (Chinsamy and Tumarkin-Deratzian, 2009; Chinsamy et al., 2012). Many of the relationships that I describe here can be explored on the website: https://academictree.org/evolution/peopleinfo. Thus is my academic family complete. I will train no further students. After 46 years of teaching, I shall soon turn out to pasture—but not immediately! I look upon what my students have accomplished both during my tutelage and afterward, and I see that it is very good. Few things have given me greater joy than to publish with my students, to link my name in print with theirs. This includes the present project, in which I am joined by Brandon Hedrick as coeditor and many of my students and academic descendants as authors. No scholar lives in a vacuum. In a rare fit of modesty, Newton remarked, “If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” I literally see further because of my students. Unfailingly they have expanded me. I have traveled around the globe with them, working on five continents and 15 countries. When I was young, I failed to appreciate the significance of history. How could that callow 20-year-old I once was understand that he was already part of history? Anyone who is my student is already part of a lineage that extends back in time seven generations, and forward already four generations. We are all part of history! We who study fossil lineages are ourselves part of a great scholarly lineage—I like to think that Joseph Leidy would be proud!