Students loved that, and how he timed his lectures to the second. To illustrate the body’s natural shock-absorbers, he would stomp round the room on a peg leg, reading the description of Captain Ahab’s gait in “Moby Dick”. When necessary, he would draw bones and muscles on his own suit. Later, he illustrated his lectures with fine anatomical drawings, painstakingly rendered with what he proudly called Harvard’s best collection of sharpened chalks (he was not a PowerPoint person). He was the first Yale Graduate School student to cross over to the Medical School, to study anatomy and embryology. But to crack the secrets of the fossil world, he had to master not only the rocks but the organisms they hid.
He feared that he and his friends would be left “to build our careers with carefully stacked minutiae”. Arriving at Yale to study geology in 1964, he was told that all major aspects of vertebrate evolution were already understood.
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