Presentation of the Charles Schuchert Award of the Paleontological Society to Bruce Smith Lieberman / Response by Bruce S. Lieberman

Journal of Paleontology, Jul 2003 by Eldredge, Niles

I am very happy to be here today to present the citation to Bruce Lieberman for this year's Schuchert Award-for I view Bruee as one of the very best and brightest young paleontologists currently gracing our profession. I also value him as a terrific former student, now an esteemed colleague-and as a great guy and a very good friend.

The first piece of correspondence I ever received from Bruce is dated 8 January 1986; Bruce wrote that he had taken Steve Gould's course at Harvard-and that course, plus Steve's personal encouragement, helped him to decide to turn his childhood fantasy (as he put it) of being a paleontologist into a reality. That letter got him up and running, as I was able to cobble together the necessary funds for Bruce to spend a chunk of the upcoming summer months cutting his newly erupting paleontological teeth on Devonian trilobites at the American Museum.

Bruce was a winner from the get-go. What all paleontologists need to have is basic love-of-fossil-and Brace quickly showed that he had that in spades. But he also had something more: an intellectual love of the fossil record and what it can tell us about how life has evolved. Sixteen years later, after post-doc stints with Elisabeth Vrba at Yale and Andy Knoll at Harvard, and now as an Associate Professor at the University of Kansas (with its justly renowned history in paleontology), Bruce still puts in long hours wrestling with specimens-albeit more recently likely to be Cambrian than the dear old Devonian, and now more likely to come from the Arctic or Antarctic than upstate New York or Bolivia.

But what always caught my eye, and what brings us together on this dais today, is Bruce's creativity and keen analytical skills in wrestling with evolutionary and biogeographic problems posed by the trilobites and other fossils that have passed under his microscope. Sure, stasis is a real phenomenon-Bruce documented it in great statistical detail in the work he did that very first summer at the American Museum, when he tackled the homalonotid trilobite Dipleura dekayi from the Hamilton group of upstate New York, also showing that it is indeed barely distinguishable, if at all, from slightly older specimens from the Devonian of Bolivia.

But not content with mere documentation, Bruce has gone on to pioneer the idea that stasis is actually the expected outcome of within and among demic dynamics in widespread species-having subsequently investigated the semi-independent demic histories in each of two species of Devonian brachiopods, each integrated into several different community assemblages. He has continued this work as a member of our ecumenically diverse team of ecologists, geneticists and paleobiologists supported by the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis.

Stasis was for starters with Bruce. Bruce came to Columbia University and the American Museum in the Fall of 1989. One of the first things we did was to skip out and go see the documentary on Thelonious Monk (Bruce is a saxophone player, and a former jazz DJ at Harvard's radio station; I fool around with the cornet). Graduate student life in New York demands an independent spirit, a sense of self-starter initiative. Bruce, of course, had that-but he also had Greg Edgecombe there, and other fellow students to hang out and play guitar with. A good, critical peer group assemblage. And he soon got off in his own directions.

In a bold move, Bruce was an early participant in molecular systematics. He sensed that new things likely emerge when disparate fields are juxtaposed. Inasmuch as Devonian fossils lack the characteristic gobs of DNA and RNA necessary for molecular analysis, he temporarily switched to turritellid gastropods-with their abundant fossil record and of course their presence in today's world. Combining his molecular analysis with a cladistic analysis of the morphology of fossil and recent turritellids, Brace falsified the notion that species with non-planktotrophic larvae form a monophyletic clade, as would be expected under the general rubric of species selection. Instead, Bruce introduced an alternative hypothesis to account for the greater number of species with non-planktotrophic larvae-a novel idea based on differences in the timing of germ-line sequestration in turritellids with planktonic vs. non-planktonic larval development. This work, combining evo-devo with molecular systematics and good old pure paleontology, is utterly typical of the dynamic, integrative approach that Bruce consistently has taken during these early, extremely fertile years of his career.

Going molecular also, I am happy to say, meant that Bruce met Paulyn Cartwright, at that time serving as our first molecular lab supervisor before going off to Yale to finish her Ph.D. The happy result is marriage with, at present count, two great kids.

There's tons more. Fresh-water mussel post-Pleistocene recolonization of newly de-iced waterways-leading to fresh insights on the movements of alien species past and present. Thick, meaty monographs on asteropyginid, proetid and olenellid trilobites. Basal Cambrian speciation rates. And so on. Bruce has now picked up the habit of writing books-and his 2000 Kluwer book Paleobiogeography. Using Fossils to Study Global Change, Plate Tectonics, and Evolution is at one and the same time a milestone statement of the application of modern approaches to biogeography to the fossil record-and, I think, a harbinger of more and equally stimulating books to come.