Presentation of the Paleontological Society Medal to David M. Raup / Response

We often talk about a renaissance in paleontology that ostensibly began in the late 1960s, but actually a few members of our profession were moving imaginatively in new directions several years earlier. These workers actually set the renaissance in motion. Prominent among them was Dave Raup. Dave has always been an iconoclast who has perversely-but often justifiably-doubted conventional wisdom, and because of the highly original research born of this skepticism, paleontology will never be the same.

Dave began and ended his formal academic career at the University of Chicago, starting as an undergraduate and retiring from an endowed chair more than four decades later, following graduate work at Harvard and professional stints at Caltech, Johns Hopkins, the University of Rochester, and the Field Museum. Thus, Dave made a great geographic loop that began and ended in Chicago, and from his stops along the way many students rocketed off on productive careers, recognizing that they had benefited from a unique graduate experience under the influence of a great innovator. Today, it's difficult to imagine the day when Bernie Kummel, Dave's graduate advisor, informed him that it was time to choose the particular taxonomic group and the particular stratigraphic interval to which he would devote his academic life.

Early in his career, Dave mounted echinoid plates on a universal stage to locate the orientations of their c-axes. Among other things, this produced a classification that met the approval of none other than Porter Kier, who at the time was revamping echinoid paleontology. Soon after this, Dave invented a scheme for portraying the coiling geometry of animals in quantitative terms. Long before other paleontologists were using mainframe computers, let alone PCs, Dave had his own small computer, complete with a monitor on which he could punch up a logarithmic spiral, deform it, and manipulate it in three dimensions as an engineer might do with an automobile design. This was not simply play. It led to research by Dave and his students on the theoretical and functional morphology of everything from ammonites to brachiopods. In the late 1960s Dave also invented a way of growing an echinoid with a computer, and I have always remembered a lesson that I learned from his honest appraisal of what he had done. Basically, he said that he could grow an echinoid but this didn't necessarily mean he was growing an echinoid the way that an echinoid grows an echinoid. In other words, any simulation can produce the right result for the wrong reasons.

Certainly, Dave Raup is best known today for the clever mathematical techniques that he has devised or adapted from population biology for analyzing fossil data in order to uncover patterns of evolution and extinction: techniques such as survivorship analysis, cohort analysis, and rarefaction. What many people do not know is that Dave doesn't really know a great deal of formal mathematics. He is highly gifted at it but never happened to study a lot of it in college. He has great mathematical insight and finds original ways of applying existing quantitative approaches-particularly those of demography-to paleontological ends. In the process, Dave has created what amounts to a Raupian tradition. He has spawned many students whose research is in this tradition, and he has attracted many disciples from afar.

Years ago, in writing the textbook Principles of Paleontology, Dave Raup and I enjoyed a wonderful collaboration, to which we each brought quite different interests, bodies of knowledge, and points of view. What delighted me about Dave's contributions was that they were very original and yet very solid. Take a look, for example, at the section on modes of skeletal growth. In the late 1960s, hardly anyone else would have thought of including such material in a book of this type, and yet Dave's creative treatment of the subject was highly valued by all users of our book.

Perhaps the most striking thing about Dave Raup is that you never know what he's going to do next. What you do know is that it will be original and sophisticated and may well be unsettling. You can also anticipate that it will stimulate a great deal of research by other scientists. It is a great honor for me to present David M. Raup for the Paleontological Society Medal. There will never be a more deserving recipient of this award.

STEVEN M. STANLEY

Morton K. Blaustein Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218

Copyright Paleontological Society Jul 1998
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