Journal of Paleontology, 91(6), 2017, p. 1326–1327 Copyright © 2017, The Paleontological Society 0022-3360/17/0088-0906 doi: 10.1017/jpa.2017.100
Awards and Citations
Presentation of the 2014 Charles Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society to Shanan E. Peters
Michael Foote Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, 5734 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637,USA⟨
mfoote@uchicago.edu⟩
do. Not so with Shanan. From the time I first met him over fifteen years ago—shortly after which he asked me to give him a series of increasingly difficult exercises so he could teach him- self computer programming (in the days before R and python, when we had to wrestle with C and FORTRAN)—he has never stopped challenging himself. But somehow he combines the humility of the lifelong student with something I can only call hutzpah. He simply cannot help being thrilled—in a deep emotional and intellectual sense—by bold ideas. The pace at which he generated them as a graduate student naturally led me
Fellow paleontologists, I am delighted today to have the chance to say a few words about Shanan Peters. Shanan got an early start in paleontology, collecting with his uncle, Ken Karns, with whom he also developed an impressive museum. Shanan is such an avid naturalist—any of you who have been in the field with him may have seen him identify any plant, animal, or fungus in sight; manage to stay unbitten in the midst of a swarm of mosquitoes; or dive a couple of bodies’ lengths to snag a beetle —that he could have gone in any direction in his career. We’re fortunate he chose to focus on the paleontological and geolo- gical parts of natural history. Sometimes people who find a passion early are poor students because they know everything already, or think they
to dub him “TheWhippersnapper.” But there has always been a firm foundation supporting all the what-if scenarios we have argued about over the years (often late at night over a bottle of Scotch):What if the Late Ordovician extinction episode were a spurious by-product of stratigraphic incompleteness? What if our perception of the Cambro-Ordovician radiation were dis- torted by a change in the evenness of community structure? What if, despite the legacy of the 1981 Sepkoski et al. “Con- sensus Paper,” changes in biodiversity over the Phanerozoic were exaggerated by the quality of the record after all? What if, instead, both the record and true biodiversity were independent manifestations of a common underlying driver? It is with this last what-if question that Shanan made his
earliest big impact. I think he has provided the most compelling evidence to date of what has come to be known as the “common- cause hypothesis,” showing, for example that large-scale tem- poral and spatial patterns of origination and extinction are not consistent with being mere artifacts of the stratigraphic record, but instead indicate that both taxonomic turnover and the architecture of the record share a common cause (or causes).
To develop and carry out tests of the common-cause hypoth-
esis, Shanan built an impressive database and array of analytical tools that he collectively refers to as “Macrostratigraphy.” I admit it took me years to grasp his innovative proposal to study stratigraphic units in the same analytical framework as fossil taxa, with rates of sedimentary initiation (akin to origination) and termination (extinc- tion), but this proved to be a key insight that enabled rigorous tests of alternative hypotheses. This impressive effort had humble beginnings when, as a graduate student, Shanan assembled a stra- tigraphic compilation based on a crude tabulation of formation names in North America. (On this subject, I cannot resist a favorite anecdote. We worked together on the formation compilation, with me reading out and Shanan typing in relevant data from Grace Keroher’smassive Lexicon of Geologic Names of the United States.We had agreed to skip formations with a stated thickness of less than 10 feet. So imagine Shanan’s consternation when I came to the unit on which he had cut his paleontological teeth—and continued to study with Kennard Bork at Denison—and I read out from page four thousand one hundred ten: “Waldron Shale;Mid- dle Silurian; Southern Indiana, west-central Kentucky, and central Tennessee … Thickness between 2 and 5 feet; average 3 feet.” Sorry, Shanan, we can’t include it. But The Whippersnapper wouldn’t accept that, so he convinced me that he could specify dozens of localities he had personally visited where it was 12 feet thick ormore. Youmight think he was bluffing. But I’ve played a fair bit of poker with Shanan, and, trust me, he doesn’t know how to bluff. As with his research, hewins at cards by folding early with a weak hand and betting hard on a strong hand.) Anyway, Mac- rostrat has enabled a wide range of hitherto impossible analyses— especially when linked with the Paleobiology Database—such as assessing the spatial completeness of paleontological sampling, or Phanerozoic-scale changes in paleoenvironment in relation to extinction selectivity. Shanan has made a big splash with Macrostratigraphy, but
there’s a lot more one could say. He’sa fine geologist and teacher when he dons his boots and heads out to the field. (He was even able to teach the likes of me how to collect paleocommunity data.) His Ph.D. work documented increased evenness in community structure from the Cambrian to the Ordovician, and—importantly, given that we often wring our hands about the meaning of global diversity—documented that local diversity and abundance of elements of Sepkoski’s Evolutionary Faunas closely match their representation
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