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Inside the Blue Book
Shell Game
December
2000
by Bruce Fellman
G&G
624a
Invertebrate Paleontology
Faculty: Adolf Seilacher, Professor (adjunct) of Geology and Geophysics
"The
natural world is a treasure house of evolutionary experiments in
construction,"
says Adolf Seilacher, an expert in the techniques that animals without
backbones have developed over the past half-billion years to assemble
their bodies. In a course aimed at advanced undergraduates and graduate
students interested in the history of life, Seilacher, who spends
the fall semester at Yale and the spring term in Germany, introduces
the wide variety of fabrication strategies used by such animals
as sponges, corals, snails, and clams that have led to the diversity
of form scientists see in the fossil record.
Seilacher's view
of invertebrate paleontology is, in many ways, an unapologetic throwback to an earlier kind of science. The paleontologist -- recipient of the Crafoord Prize,
geology's Nobel, in 1992 -- emphasizes observation and pattern recognition. Students
work extensively with the Peabody Museum's fossil collection, and they learn to
draw with the camera lucida, a venerable device that enables a viewer to accurately
trace the contours and surface structure of an organism. "I want to convince people
that good data are not just numbers," says Seilacher. "Pictures and observations
are important, too."
The instructor says
he "hates exams," and so over the course of the semester, students are instead expected to develop what they've seen and learned into a research project "in
which the answer is not known."
Understanding how evolution has shaped raw material into skeletons and enabled organisms to thrive
and, over time, colonize new territory is essentially an exercise in pattern recognition.
And these patterns, the geologist believes, may govern the development of the
veins in tree leaves and insect wings, and the teeth of lobsters, as well as the
growth of ancient shells. "I teach the art of observation," says Seilacher, "and
that gives students a new way of looking at nature."  |
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