Journal of Paleontology, 91(6), 2017, p. 1322–1323 Copyright © 2017, The Paleontological Society 0022-3360/17/0088-0906 doi: 10.1017/jpa.2017.98
Awards and Citations
Presentation of the 2014 Paleontological SocietyMedal to Erle G. Kauffman Peter Harries Department ofMarine, Earth, and Atmospheric Sciences, NorthCarolina StateUniversity,Raleigh,North Carolina 27695,USA⟨
pjharrie@ncsu.edu⟩
Good evening members of the Paleontological Society, friends of paleontology, and guests. It is both a distinct honor and pleasure for me to have nominated and be the citationist for Erle Galen Kauffman as a recipient of the Paleontological Society Medal. Put simply, he is one of themost influential paleontologists of his generation. Erle was born and grew up in Washington, DC and eventually found his way to the University of Michigan where he received his Bachelor’s, Master’s, and culminated with his Ph.D. in 1961. From there, he started his professional career at the Smithsonian Institution, and initiated a number of very fruitful collaborations with colleagues both at that institution, most notably with Norm Sohl, and with numerous colleagues both nationally and internationally that would characterize the rest of his career. From there, he relocated to his beloved Colorado and started teaching at the CU-Boulder in 1980. In his last relocation, he moved to Indiana University in 1996 where he is currently a Professor Emeritus. In considering the qualities that make Erle such a worthy
recipient of this distinguished medal, I think it is best to look at three components: his research, his mentorship of aspiring paleontologists, and his approach to life. But I think we also have to look beyond those aspects and consider his unwavering passion for the discipline, his ability to meld paleontology with a range of other disciplines, his emphasis on using field-based observations to delve into various pressing problems in the geosciences, his unceasing willingness to share his knowledge with all, and his mode of engaging all around him. As a scientist, Erle’simpact on the discipline reflects his interests in integrating paleontology into the broader spectrum of the Geosciences. This reflects the seemingly limitless range of his interests, knowledge base, and energy—an approach that started early in his academic career. During his Ph.D. research, he initially was working on the stratigraphy and structural history of Huerfano Park in southern
Colorado.Given that his advisor, J.A. Dorr, went on sabbatical as Erle was close to finishing, he decided that, given the free time on his hands, hemight aswellwork up the paleontologywhile hewas waiting—and thus launched a life-time of work. His dissertation ended up being an amazing 1500 page, two-volume matching set (and some of his students took it as a challenge to match that length, although not me) and became the starting point that launched Erle’s career using his beloved Western Interior Seaway as a natural laboratory for both him, his students, and other researchers he brought into the region. Within this setting, and given his ready ability to articulate what he saw in the field to a range of insights, he began using
what he had learned in that basin to address a host of issues ranging from mass extinction to anoxia to sequence stratigraphy and beyond. In looking at his vita, there is such an incredible range to what he was involved in—bivalve functional morphology, evolutionary patterns and rates, Milankovitch cyclicity in the Cretaceous, low-oxygen facies, biogeography, the list goes on. But I feel he is best known for his work in three areas: the detailed documentation of mass extinction and other bioevents, his critical contributions to the development of high-resolution stratigraphy, and last, but certainly not least, his work on two groups of bizarre and enigmatic bivalves: the inoceramids and rudistids. Another of Erle’s outstanding attributes was his willingness
to share and collaborate. During my time at CU, and I’m sure this has been a pattern throughout his career, there were a countless streams of both established researchers and students who made the pilgrimage to Boulder to learn about the Western Interior, plan various collaborations, and, most importantly, get a ‘field’s-eye’ view of various sections, especially Pueblo—now the GSS for the Cenomanian-Turonian boundary—from one of the people who put that basin on the map as a great natural laboratory for unraveling Earth history. Erle has also been a very active mentor of students
throughout his career, and it is in this setting that I first came to know him—as a Ph.D. student at the University Colorado. I was lucky enough to spend the year following my Bachelor’s working in what was then the Department of Invertebrates at the American Museum of Natural History as a photographer, primarily for Neil Landman. In discussing my future plans and my passion for fieldwork, Neil had suggested that I get in touch with Erle. Given that this was in the days before Skype(!) let alone the internet, my initial conversations with Erle were by phone and snail mail, and I certainly was enthralled by his
expectations of students working with him. However, when I first met Erle in person I was in shock; here was a professor who was dressed in straggly t-shirt and a pair of shorts barely held together with an assortment of baby pins and the
like.As soon as we started talking, however, his passion for all that he did shone through, and he was forced to by a pair of new shorts because those that he treasured just wouldn’t do for a fieldtrip he was leading for Exxon. Returning to his mentoring, he assisted numerous aspiring
paleontologists while he was at the Smithsonian and got them involved in paleontologic research generally with a focus on using fieldwork to analyze various problems. There, he
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