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May-June 2008
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< previous | 1 | 2 | 3 Shubin says he wrote the book to explain his work to his father, Seymour Shubin, who still writes crime novels and thrillers for a living at 87. “I gave him the first draft and he said, ‘I don’t understand it,’” Shubin said at a winter reading at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge. “He told me, ‘Neil, nobody ever lost money writing a page turner.’ I said, ‘Dad, I’m a scientist. We don’t write page turners.’ But I wrote it over again. And this time he liked it.” Your Inner Fish, in fact, is something of an adventure tale. It pulls in the reader even though the Tiktaalik discovery took six years and four often frustrating, error-filled trips into deep wilderness to complete. “For starters, there were polar bears,” says Shubin, a city boy from Philadelphia. “And polar bears eat people.” On the group’s first expedition to the Canadian Arctic, in 1999—which Shubin calls a “colossal bad choice” all around—they took rifles and motion detectors, which they set up in their tents before going to sleep. Not long after, the detectors went off and everyone jumped up, cocked their guns, and raced outside. Nothing was there. This scenario played out at least four times before someone realized that it was not lurking man-eaters setting the detectors off, but ferocious winds. “These detectors were made for suburban New Jersey, not the Arctic,” Shubin jokes. “You’ve just got to learn in fieldwork that you never get it just right.”
That wasn’t the first field trip to leave a strong impression on him. As a child, he loved going to museums, especially the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia and the Natural History Museum in New York City. In high school, he worked on an urban archaeological site and “loved ancient Egypt and Tutankhamen and seeing the past inside the dirt,” he explains. “Paleontology pulled me into the immediacy of discoveries. If you know where to look, and crack inside the rocks, and find a physical piece of evidence that can change the way we look at our past—this struck me as very powerful.” At Columbia, he majored in biology and anthropology, which led to paleontology and then doctoral work at Harvard. In the 1980s, academic research in anatomy and development focused on the relationships between living creatures and fossils on the cellular level, using embryos. “Only a handful of people were doing it, and few as well as those at Harvard,” Shubin points out. (This was before new technological tools enabled scientists to work on the molecular level.) His first Harvard-affiliated expedition came in 1983, on the field team of professor of biology and curator of vertebrate paleontology Farish A. Jenkins Jr., who was working in the American West, looking for new sites and early mammals that could help explain how humans developed the ability to chew. Shubin writes that the mammalian method for chewing first emerged in fossil records dating from 225 million to 195 million years ago, in big-headed reptiles that walked on all fours and had bony jaws with teeth that fell out and re-grew throughout their lives. Having finally learned how to spot bones in the dust, mud, and dirt, Shubin grew eager to lead his own trip. He explored 200-million-year-old Connecticut rocks a half-day’s trip away from Cambridge before expanding to Nova Scotia; ultimately, he found enough bones to fill a few shoeboxes among the sandstone cliffs in the Bay of Fundy. Among them was a significant find: a piece of an early mouse-like mammal with a tiny jaw and a few teeth best seen under a microscope. The remains of this tritheledont, previously linked only to South Africa, showed it had a human way of chewing food. “I had an idea for field research and Harvard had the resources to support this independent research,” he says. “If that hadn’t existed, I wouldn’t be here talking about all of this today.” By now, his main academic interest was the morphology of the tetrapod limb. Working with the embryos of salamanders, frogs, and fish, Shubin wrote his dissertation on developmental biology and the similarities between fins and limbs. He spent the next two years doing postdoctoral work at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also met and married geologist Michele Seidl ’85 (now director of planning for biological sciences at the University of Chicago). An 11-year stint at the University of Pennsylvania followed.
At Penn, and still searching for the origins of limbed creatures, Shubin focused his sights on the already well-studied Catskill Formation of Pennsylvania. In the Late Devonian age, when Shubin and others say some animals were making the switch from sea to land, this region was akin to today’s Amazon River delta, he notes, with many streams draining into a large sea where Pittsburgh now stands. In 1993, he and one of his graduate students, Ted Daeschler, began visiting rock zones recently blasted out by the state transportation department to prepare for more roadways. To their surprise, Shubin relates in Your Inner Fish, Daeschler one day found “a marvelous shoulder bone” that they named Hynerpeton, Greek for “little creeping animal from Hyner,” Pennsylvania. The two men formed a dynamic partnership—Shubin always pushing on to the next target; Daeschler patiently working to examine a given spot thoroughly. In 1998 they were in Shubin’s office, having an academic argument about the next most plausible search sites, when one of them pulled out a geology textbook to prove a point and found a diagram that stopped them short. It showed three places on earth with known Late Devonian freshwater rocks: eastern North America—home of Hynerpeton; the east coast of Greenland (where the earliest known tetrapods had already been found); and well-exposed rocks in the Canadian Arctic that, the duo realized, were unexplored. No paleontological field guides existed for that area, but Shubin knew one man who had led previous trips to Greenland and was experienced enough to help them: Farish Jenkins. (Later that day, Shubin adds, he and Daeschler went to a Chinese restaurant where Shubin’s fortune cookie held this gem: “Soon you will be at the top of the world.” This slip of paper was taped to his office door for years.) That first outing, in 1999—the time of the motion-detector debacle, when terrible weather kept the researchers inside tents for three weeks rereading every book they’d brought—was on Melville Island in the western part of the Canadian Arctic. They found plenty of fish fossils, but all appeared to be deep-water dwellers, not the shallows skimmers that ultimately crept on shore. The following year, better prepared for five weeks in the wild, Shubin, Daeschler, and their team set up camp on Ellesmere Island, with permission from the Inuit people of the Nunavut Territory. One evening, an undergraduate in the party, Jason Downs, failed to return to the base camp on time. “We were very worried, but then he came limping into the cook tent with a wild-eyed stare, like he’d been chased by polar bears,” Shubin recalls. “But we knew he hadn’t been, because his pockets were full of bones.” That same night, the team spent hours (in the Arctic summer, the sun never sets) documenting the site and gathering fragments. 1 | 2 | 3 | continued >  
 
 
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