I was a rock hound when I was a kid, I had
a rock collection
and so I think in a way I was
predisposed to be a curator, loving to
organize things and try and interpret
patterns about about the world. I was
interested in science but I was also
interested in, very passionately,
about literature. When I  went to college I
wasn't sure whether I'd be an english
major or a
scientist, so I took a little bit of
both and when I
took a course that was
euphemistically called for rocks for jocks,
'cause it was supposed to be an easy class,
turned out to be very very difficult and
challenging but extremely exciting
because all the labs were outside, and I thought wow, this is pretty cool this is a
way that one could potentially make a
living and spend some time outside and
explore nature.
So my research spans everything from
geologic history, trying to understand
the uplift of the Andes mountains,
the break-up of the continents over earth
history
to very fine scale understandings of
evolution of of brains in different
groups of mammals
or the rates at which DNA changes overtime. I've been really lucky to
have the opportunity to do fieldwork 
throughout my career, it's something that 
 keeps me alive and
vibrant,
making new discoveries bringing things back
having a whole archive of
information that you're gonna be able to
work from for decades into the
future and in fact others will be able
to work on after my career is over, so 
I have feel projects in India,
Madagascar, I've been to Angola recently, 
major programs in South America
primarily in the Andes of Chile where I 
lived for a year with my family
when I had a special Guggenheim
fellowship. When we first started working in
South America, we had been drawn by a
report of a visitor to the museum just
out of the blue came in is that I have
some pictures of whale fossils from the
andes and visitor services people called
upstairs, we  said yeah, let's take a
look, and that turned out that they were, and
we mounted an expedition the
next summer and 
went and looked for these things. We
found some more whale fossils, sitting up at
six thousand feet in the Andes,
whales don't live in the 
Andes, so that tells you something about
the uplift where they were living 
underneath the ocean and today the mountains
have risen to their current elevation so
that was
something that was not what
you'd expect to find in the mountains.
And when we didn't find a whole lot more
of those specimens,
as good geologists we had maps
with us and we said well there's some
rocks over in this other that
look kind of interesting as
well, let's go take a look at those. And
when we arrived, it
turned out there was a vast fossil field of land dwelling
mammals that had never been known before; and that opened up the
idea of looking in the Andes for these fossils. I would have to say that
actually one of the rewards of being a
scientist is
having students, you know, just  thinking
that you're helping to leave a legacy,
that's very exciting to me, the fact that
I might be able to contribute
something to a long, long history that goes
forward into the future.
