AASP Primary Records Program

Bill, you took your first geology course in 1940 and were immediately attracted to paleontology. To provide an overview for the rest of this interview, please consider briefly the 64 years that have passed since then and give us your thoughts on three general topics:

QUESTION 1. Would you sketch in a nutshell the outlines of your career in geology/paleontology and teaching? Where were you located and what were your principal concerns and activities through the years?

Answer: In this case Gaul is divided into four parts: as a student at Johns Hopkins, in my first job at the University of Rochester, my interval in industrial research, and my years at Stanford.

From 1940 to 1948 I was a student at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. For the first 3 years I was an undergraduate and first year graduate student. Then came an interruption during the war years, from 1943-1946. For most of that time I was an aerial photo-interpreter in the U.S. 14th Air Force in China. After the war I returned to Hopkins to finish my studies and left for my first teaching job in 1948 before I had actually received my degree.

As an undergraduate I was, of course, mostly taking classes, but before the start of my sophomore year I knew that geology, and specifically paleontology, would be my field and I had already collected materials that eventually provided the fossils, not only for my dissertation research but also for continuing research until 1956. My transition to a graduate student was "peculiar", partly because of the acceleration of university schedules during the war and partly because I was also enrolled in the Infantry Reserve Officers Training Corps.

When I came back to Hopkins after the war I proceeded with graduate courses and Ph,.D. research, which was on silicified Ordovician trilobites. I was a graduate teaching assistant during that time and I also had a real trial-by-fire when I was suddenly given the responsibility of teaching the department's regular one-semester physical geology course. But, I survived (and there were some "perks" to the effort) and I was then totally convinced that I wanted to go into teaching.

Another unexpected turn of events presented me with a job opportunity that I could not refuse, as an instructor at the University of Rochester. So, in fall of 1948 I left Hopkins before finishing my dissertation and without a degree.

At the U of R I taught courses in invertebrate paleontology and stratigraphy, both undergraduate and graduate. The department was small and I was "it" as far as soft-rock geology was concerned. I had been hired to take over this field from the chairman of the department, who had also become dean. During the years at Rochester I progressed from instructor to associate professor and the last year there I was acting chairman of the department.

My research at Rochester was almost entirely devoted to silicified Ordovician trilobites. It was an eventful 8 years: I finished my dissertation, got my Ph.D., got married, bought a house, had two sons, published papers, and was for 3 years editor of the Journal of Paleontology. They were happy years and very busy years. They were also somewhat frustrating years, with a very tight budget and with future prospects that developed to seem unattractive. So, when the opportunity arose in 1956 to join the Carter Oil Company research group in Tulsa as a senior research geologist, I took it.

The change from academia to industry was abrupt in some ways and gentle in others. Teaching and departmental responsibilities were suddenly ended and I was in a working environment of quite different character. But living was easier owing to a better salary and because I had joined related specialists in a group that had a very special character. I soon realized that I had a fantastic opportunity. To be sure, my concern with Ordovician trilobites was at an end, but in its place the unexplored realm of fossil dinoflagellates opened up to me and that received the bulk of my effort for the next 6 years. It was terribly exciting to explore this nearly virgin territory and new ideas about dinoflagellates developed quickly. In 1959 the company sent me to Europe for 6 weeks of study on dinos and in 1960 I went to India (and, incidentally, around the world) on company business unrelated to dinos. When I returned from that trip I received, out of the blue, an invitation to be for 6 months a visiting professor at Stanford and, amazingly to me, my request for a leave of absence for the first half of 1961 was granted.

My family (which then included a third son) and I had a wonderful time in California. I got my first experience teaching palynology, did a little exploring of California sediments for organic microfossils, and returned to Tulsa in the summer never expecting to live in California again. .......However,.......happy as I had been at the research lab, change is inevitable and by the end of 1961 circumstances there made me exceedingly glad that I had by then accepted the offer of a tenured professorship in the geology department at Stanford. So, in the fall of 1962, a new phase of my professional life began. We moved to Palo Alto, I returned to teaching, and many aspects of our life changed once more.

Of course there were many developments during my quarter-century at Stanford. My teaching was concerned with palynology and also, after the first few years, invertebrate paleontology. Graduate students and my own research were concentrated on palynology, principally dinoflagellates. Beginning in 1971, in summers and on sabbaticals, I taught a total of 36 2-week concentrated courses on dinoflagellates, on a consulting basis both at Stanford and elsewhere in the U.S. and Europe. These courses were populated to a large extent by palynologists from industry, and gave me a chance to test and teach my developing ideas about dinoflagellate morphology and relationships. Administrative responsibilities included the inevitable departmental and school committee work, as well as associate department chairmanship for part of the time.

I officially retired in 1986 but taught part-time for a couple more years. Since 1988, except for completing one extensive paper on Palaeoperidinium in 1996, I have left geology and palynology behind and turned my attention to a variety of other interests that I had only been able to dabble in earlier.

---That was a big nutshell, but it covered a lot of territory.

QUESTION 2. What changes have dominated the scene of paleontology over those years and where have your interests and activities placed you with respect to these changes?

Answer: Of course, paleontology, like the rest of geology, is a different science today than it was 64 years ago but I would name three changes as having overriding importance. Certainly the most sweeping of these has been the emergence of the concept of plate tectonics, which has thrown every aspect of earth science into a different light than heretofore. Second, for the biological aspects of the field, there have been the major developments in molecular biology and statistical methods, and in our understanding of genetics and evolution. And the third major change, I would say, has been the growth of interest in and understanding of the environment. That includes its current and future importance to the world and its inhabitants, the role that it has played in shaping the physical and organic evolution of the earth, and the development of methods by which past environmental conditions can be inferred from the stratigraphic record.

These changes opened many new career possibilities and profoundly changed the nature and demands of others, but they have had exceedingly little effect on my own particular interests. That's because I began and have remained throughout an essentially "old school" paleontologist, in the sense that my efforts have been devoted almost entirely to the observation and interpretation of the morphology of the fossils. It's morphology that has always fascinated me, whether the fossils be trilobites or dinoflagellates or something else. I early became convinced that morphology is fundamental to everything that can be done with fossils, from the first step in identification to the last step in interpretation---and morphology is not changed by the passage of time and it is wholly independent of whatever revolutionary changes may be occurring in other aspects of geology and biology. The special key to my success has been that I have sought and found, or have had the good fortune to be provided, exceptionally well-preserved material on which to work.

Whatever small and brief excursions I have personally made in the directions of taxonomy and classification, stratigraphic ranges of morphotypes, and aspects of sedimentary environment have been limited to matters that I simply could not avoid while pursuing the subject on which my morphological interest was concentrated. I realize fully that I was profoundly fortunate to have been able to focus on my chosen small target to the virtual exclusion of everything else. My hope is that this self-indulgence has, along the way, provided others with better tools and insights as they pursue more diverse objectives.

QUESTION 3. What do you view as your major contributions to the field of science that has dominated your career?

Answer: In a word, a better awareness of what the fossils were like as three-dimensional objects that performed a role---sometimes obscure, sometimes accessible to study and interpretation---in the life of the organisms they represent. This is what I have tried to communicate in my teaching and it has guided my research. In a way I regret that morphology is not a topic that most students and professionals find as fascinating as I do. I have bored many students and produced some publications that are deadly reading. On the other hand it has been nice to work where there has been relatively little competition!

To be more specific, in the field of trilobites, I was one of a number of paleontologists whose studies of wonderfully preserved silicified material made it possible to study these fossils in a depth of detail that was out of the question with most other types of preservation.

The same applies to my studies of fossil dinoflagellates. In both cases the availability of tremendous numbers of superbly preserved specimens has presented enormous opportunities to the astute observer. With dinoflagellates there has been the additional incentive to explore the possible relationships of the fossils to living representatives. And this is where---to put it in a somewhat trite and overstated way---"the past is the key to the present", rather than the other way around, as we usually think about it. For example, we definitely know more about the life cycles of some major groups of dinoflagellates today as a result of what we have observed in fossils.

In the field of teaching, my greatest satisfaction and certainly my greatest contribution has been in starting off a small group of able students---some undergraduates, some graduate students---on highly productive (and I hope satisfying) careers in paleontology and geology. Unfortunately, for some of them the road has proved difficult, and even untenable. That has been sad to see and the field of paleontology is the poorer for it; and probably none has had as easy a time of it as I think I had, but the successes are a great and much appreciated reward for my efforts.

QUESTION 4. Bill, let's follow up that excellent overview with some more specific questions. Where and when you were born, and tell us about your parents and siblings and the influences that stimulated your interest in science early in your life.

Answer: I was born in Baltimore, Maryland---was, and remained, my parents' only child. Until I was nearly 4 we lived in the house of my maternal grandparents in a Baltimore suburb. Then we moved to the country between Baltimore and Annapolis, an area that has since been engulfed by the spread of the big city. At that time it was really country: cranked party-line telephone that "exploded" in every thunderstorm, kerosene cookstove and water heater, coal furnace, black subsistence farmer locals who huckstered by horse-drawn wagon, 45-minute drive to Baltimore on winding 2-lane roads, belt-line electric train to the city, gasoline 20 cents a gallon and gravity fed from a hand-pumped overhead glass tank, closest store and school (3 rooms for 8 grades) 2 miles away, store service by individual clerks who plucked each item from the shelf and then wrote each down in pencil and totalled the lot by hand, milk 8 cents a quart, bread 5 cents a loaf (all Wonderbread!), ground steak 35 cents a pound, fish 5 or 10 when available.

Those were ancient and primitive times, but they had their good points and certainly a profound influence on me. We lived in a rented house (200 years old) in a one-acre fenced yard, but had use of 150 acres of fields and pine woods that were part of the same property, which extended to a small tributary of the Magothy River. The house lay feet from the only, and busy, Baltimore-Annapolis "Boulevard". There were no kids nearby and no safe way for getting together with them had there been. Even when I went to high school in Annapolis (12 miles) it was by school bus and too far to linger after school with others. So my formative years were ones of great independence from the influences of "colleagues"; I was more exposed, and more comfortable with the adult friends of my parents---who came infrequently enough in view of the distance from Baltimore---than with my contemporaries.

For amusement at home I was on my own much of the time. I wandered in the woods; played with our purely pet animals (which, at the maximum, included a billygoat, a Mexican burro, a cat, and 5 dogs) and, in the house, devised ways to pass the time which I never found hanging heavy. To this sort of environment I attribute my early and enduring interest in nature and my attention to and developing skill in observation of living things.

I was also exceedingly fortunate in the two parents I chose! My mother was a talented and well-trained artist---a very imaginative and creative graduate of the Maryland Art Institute in Baltimore. She did mostly oil painting, but later all sorts of other things. My father was inventive and mechanically inclined. Although he had a degree from Johns Hopkins as a civil engineer, he never practiced that trade. He was a pilot in Rickenbacker's famous Hat-in-the Ring Squadron for a few months at the end of the first world war and returned to find no work in his field. For some years he was in insurance and real estate and, fortunately, just before the economic bubble burst in the late 20s, was hired by a family friend who ran the Annapolis Dairy Products Company. That is what took us to the country. He had that job or its derivatives until he retired. It was strictly his job and not his love---an eight-hour affair with no papers or responsibilities brought home evenings or on weekends---but it put bread on the table and saw us through the Great Depression so that I was virtually unaware of the hard times others were having.

Weekends and long summer evenings were spent on hobbies, largely together with my mother. He provided the practical input and brawn, she the artistic talent, as they ventured into copper plate etching, iron and copper blacksmithing, wood turning, silver casting, gem faceting, silver jewelry, and wheel-thrown pottery. We had shops in various outbuildings on the property and, wherever possible, my father made the equipment necessary to do what they wanted, So I witnessed a great deal of inventive development work and artistic creativity.

We also had a boat, which was docked on the property. It was originally a 49-foot sailboat and had an interesting history of service during the first world war as a patrol boat between the two capes that mark the entrance to the Chesapeake from the Atlantic. My grandfather bought it shortly after the war and, as soon as we moved to the country, he brought the boat to our creek. My father's vacations (at first one, later two weeks a year) were almost all spent on the boat at various locales on the Chesapeake and its many tributaries. When I was in high school my father heard about the Calvert Cliffs, the famous localities for Miocene fossils on the west shore of the Chesapeake. It was our exploration of these deposits that made me aware of fossils and primed me for the effects of a geology course as a freshman in college. Right from the start it was the sorting and identification of the specimens---their variety and differences---that intrigued me; I knew little and cared less then about how and where they had lived, although their "great" age---a few million years---was terribly impressive. Later we explored the pyrite beds in the mid-Cretaceous Magothy Formation, a few miles away, and many years later, at Stanford, a graduate student did a master's on dinos from samples I collected there.

My parents were always thoroughly interested in and supportive of my own interests and activities. I early had a microscope and watched for hours as my first dinoflagellate (Ceratium hirundinella) swam in its corkscrew motion in drops of the low-saline water collected at our boat dock. Later, when I was at Hopkins we took trips to Maryland and Virgina Appalachians---also to the Cincinnati area of Ohio, the Mohawk Valley region of New York State, and the Gaspe Peninsula of Canada---enjoying together the countryside and collecting Paleozoic fossils. In other words, to a great extent my parents were also friends, colleagues, and playmates.

QUESTION 5. You studied for your undergraduate degree at the John Hopkins University. What attracted you to the field of geology, and who were the most influential professors in your undergraduate career? Tell us a little about the faculty and geology program at Hopkins at the time, and of the university in wartime.

Answer: I began college thinking to be a chemist. Despite my encounter with paleontology and geology, I was unaware of their formal ramifications and I had loved the wet chemistry of a kid's chemistry set and what soon proved to be antedated teachings of my high school chemistry class. Along with chemistry, I took elementary geology as a freshman, largely because my father (a Hopkins graduate a generation earlier) regretted that he had not been able to take geology, which had had a high reputation on campus because of the outstanding professor who had taught it in his day. When I barely scraped by freshman chemistry, thrived on geology, was fascinated by fossils, and served for 2 weeks as a summer field assistant to my G-1 teacher, I knew for sure where I would go when I began my sophomore year.

Mark Secrist was that instructor. We "clicked" in our interests and approach, and we became close friends. He definitely was my inspiration and my mentor and I will be forever grateful for his support. However, he was not an imaginative scientist and his interests in stratigraphy and paleontology were subsequent to his training as an ore-deposit geologist (thesis on ore deposits of east Tennessee!). He had no biological training and, while my first publication in geology in 1943 (jointly with him on fossils we had found in Ordovician beds in Virginia) may seem precocious and did start my bibliography in paleontology, it is not a paper I am proud to acknowledge. Amusingly, my very first publication (of which I am more proud) had been as a high school student. It was just a one-paragraph note in a monthly journal on cacti and succulents, but at least it was an accurate report on a---surprise!---morphological curiosity I had observed in a plant in my cactus and succulent collection.

QUESTION 6. In 1943, you joined the U. S. Air Force and became an officer in photo interpretation. Would you describe for us your wartime experiences?

Answer: At Hopkins I was in the Infantry ROTC unit. It was obvious that war was coming to us and that seemed the prudent thing to do. That was a 4-year program which shared the acceleration of college schedules in 1942-44 but was in no way condensed. It still required 4 academic years to complete. However, by virtue of summer schools at Hopkins before the accelerated programs were instituted and heavy academic loads in the regular terms, I received my bachelor's degree almost a full academic year before I was through with the ROTC program. That last year at Hopkins I was in limbo-land, taking graduate courses and starting research for an advanced degree at the same time I was a senior as far as ROTC was concerned.

In June of 1943 I finished with ROTC and straight away went to infantry officer training school at Fort Benning, Georgia. After 13 weeks of Georgia summer sunshine I became a fresh infantry second lieutenant in September. Through the suggestion of my mentor, Mark Secrist, and the invaluable assistance of a close family friend who was deputy head of the Maryland military draft, my request to be transferred to the Air Force Air Intelligence School at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, was approved. The primary basis for this was that my geological training equipped me reasonably for service in photo interpretation.

When I completed the course at Harrisburg I was astonished, and immensely happy, to find that I had also been permanently transferred to the Air Force. Then, after several months in various temporary stations and in transit, I ended up in March of 1944 in the 18th Photo Intelligence Detachment which was attached to Headquarters, Fourteenth Air Force in Kunming, across the "Hump" from India in southwestern China. Lady Luck followed me and, for most of two years, until the war was over, I studied aerial photos taken all over Japanese-occupied parts of southeast Asia within reconnaissance range of Kunming, including, in the last months of the war, far north-eastern China and the southern Islands of Japan. It was fascinating work that exercised and sharpened my skills at critical "morphological" observation and interpretation---of military and transportation facilities of the enemy instead of fossils.

QUESTION 7. Your first publications after the war promoted the use of stereo-photography as a tool for the paleontologist. These publications probably were stimulated by your wartime experience, and foreshadowed your lifelong emphasis of developing techniques to enhance your scientific investigations. Can you access the impact of these publications?

Answer: That's right. We studied stereo-photographs and I early saw possibilities for illustration of fossils. When an article on building a stereo-camera for that purpose appeared in the Journal of Paleontology, which my parents sent me in China, I called my father's attention to this, suggesting we think about it when I got home. When I did get home in early 1945 I found that he had already built such a camera based on the article and this is the instrument I used throughout the period when I was studying silicified trilobites. I published the first paper on the subject in 1948 to suggest how the technique might be applied, and followed that up through the years by using it to illustrate the trilobite studies.

Actually this was not the first use of stereophotographs in micropaleontology. They had been used extensively years before for illustrating late Paleozoic conodonts. However, I think my example created some new interest and there have been a scattering of papers through the years that have used them. For some purposes stereophotographs are invaluable, although they do pose some problems of space in publication and time consumption in preparation and mounting.

QUESTION 8. SEM photomicrographs now fulfill this need for microfossils, don't they?

Answer: In many cases they certainly do, although in some instances stereo SEMs are even better. For example, we found selected use of stereo SEMs to be critical in communicating the complex form of minute structures that we discovered on some specimens of Palaeoperidinium .

QUESTION 9. After the war, you returned to the John Hopkins University for your Ph.D. Did the geology faculty at Hopkins change much after the war; and, if so, how? Who were your most influential professors during your PhD studies?

Answer: A history of the geology department at Hopkins, written by the distinguished sedimentologist and Hopkins emeritus professor, Francis Pettijohn, ranks this period as a low point in Hopkins competence and reputation. A principal problem, in addition to retirements of former faculty and staff depletion during the war, was that the long-time chairman (J. T. Singewald) was convinced that "the chairman's job was to save the university money...not...to spend it wisely" (quoted from Pettijohn). The one outstanding member of the faculty, was the structural geologist, Ernst Cloos. It was he who, following Singewald's retirement, brought Pettijohn and Aaron Waters to Hopkins. That began the rebuilding of the department into a first rate one in which paleontology was "modernized" with the significant appointments of David Raup and Steven Stanley.

Ernst Cloos had, for more than one reason (as we shall no doubt discuss), an enduring effect on my life in geology---and out of it!

QUESTION 10. Your dissertation involved the study of the morphology of silicified Middle Ordovician trilobites of Virginia, a seminal study because of the details revealed from so many matrix-extracted specimens. How did you become involved with silicified trilobites..

Answer: I was led into this by a comment that I read in one of the guidebooks to the International Geological Congress that had been held in Washington, D.C., in 1933. The venerable American Museum bryozoan specialist, Ray Bassler, wrote that some fossils in the Middle Ordovician limestones at one of the scheduled field trip stops (on Tumbling Run) was known to contain silicified fossils. Also, Mark Secrist had told me that years before he had recovered silicified trilobites from Ordovician limestones west of Lake Champlain.

My curiosity took me to Tumbling Run after my freshman geology course. I etched blocks of limestone with HCl in old automobile batteries with their partitions knocked out and found some highly productive horizons, loaded with ostracods, bryozoans, and trilobites.

Unknown to me at the time, Gus Cooper at the National Museum had learned about the existence of these Virginia silicified deposits from work he had done for the government during the war, searching for sources of limestone suitable for use in making cement. He also had begun his long study of silicified fossils, especially brachiopods, in the Permian reefs of West Texas.

At the level of Paleozoic trilobites, I learned of two studies on the Virginia silicified trilobites. One was a dissertation study at Yale, by Rube Ross, the other was the first of many by Harry Whittington, a British paleontologist (later Professor of the department at Cambridge and of Burgess Shale fame), whose study Cooper had encouraged and facilitated.

QUESTION 11. Before receiving your PhD from the Johns Hopkins University, you were appointed to the geology faculty at the University of Rochester. How did this come about and when did you finally receive your degree?

Answer: This was the result of the trial-by-fire I mentioned earlier and by a highly serendipitous development for me that grew out of a nearly tragic event for someone else. At the beginning of my second year as a full-fledged graduate student at Hopkins I was to be for the second time a teaching assistant for Ernst Cloos, who was teaching the fall-semester physical geology half of introductory geology. Just after that course had been completed the previous year, he had suffered a severe heart attack. However, during the spring and summer he had recovered remarkably and I anticipated an enjoyable second year as his assistant. Then, the week before classes were to start, he had a second heart attack and starting his class was out of the question. In my quiet last days of summer freedom, I received a phone call from his wife, asking if I would come to his home so he could talk to me. His proposition: that I should take over full responsibility for the lecturing and field trips in his course. I agreed, too quickly to have thought of all the implications. It was a great experience but, needless to say I didn't get anything of my own work done. I sat in my courses and took notes and hoped for the best on exams, which I am sure were not judged with the severity applied to others. Long and short of it was I survived, he recovered---and lived 28 years more---and I had some "real" teaching under my belt.

Thus it was that, when J. Edward Hoffmeister, chairman of the department of the University of Rochester and himself a Hopkins Ph.D., phoned Professor Singewald to ask if he had anyone to suggest for the opening to be created by Hoffmeister's relinquishing his teaching duties to devote his full energy to being chairman of the department and dean of the arts college, my name was put forward. Since some students from the Rochester department had recently made very fine impressions as graduate students at Hopkins, all the advice I received was that I should accept the offer I was made---and I did. The only stipulation was that I should complete my degree requirements as promptly as possible.

QUESTION 12. Tell us a little about the faculty and geology program at the University of Rochester and the changes you witnessed during the years there. What was your role in the department?

Answer: The Rochester Department of Geology and Geography was a small one (three geologists and one geographer) but it and the university as a whole had a good reputation in science and medicine. The strongest non-medical departments were Optics (influence of local Bausch and Lomb and Kodak) and Physics (presence of important faculty in nuclear physics). Our small department had only recently been authorized to grant a Ph.D. degree, the first two recipients of which were my students, one in my second year there and one in my last. The former was Donald W. Fisher (subsequently a long career with the New York geological survey). He came having already made great strides toward his research and I deserve no credit for his future success. The other was Lew Stover, whose thesis was on Devonian ostracods from some of the richly fossiliferous strata near Rochester. Their microfossil content had never been studied and the ostracods were especially well preserved and varied. From that time on for many years the interests and activities of the Evitt and Stover families ran closely parallel.

A major and unusual feature of the department was the make-up of the student body at that time, both undergraduate and graduate. The war had ended only a few years before and very many students were veterans who had returned to school on the GI Bill They were experienced and mature beyond the usual college student. They knew exactly what they wanted from their education and were determined to get it expeditiously and get on with their interrupted lives. Many were already married, a rarity among students before then. They were also about my own age, some even years older. Therefore, as a new instructor, I had a relationship to the students, especially the numerous masters candidates, unlike any that would ever be possible again in later years.

The principal change in the department while I was there was, paradoxically, an increasingly negative effect of the success and abilities of Ed Hoffmeister, the chairman. He, like his brother whom we will touch on later in this discussion, was an approachable, kind, generous, and considerate person, basically a great pleasure to be associated with and he became a close and respected friend. However, a few years before my arrival he had been made dean of the college while also retaining the chairmanship of the department. In that situation his overly great concern that he not be seen to favor his own department meant that it increasingly came out on the "short end of the stick". He gave me every benefit of academic advancement, but the pay scale was not adequate and the strain on a growing young family gradually became overwhelming.

QUESTION 13. You met your wife, Gisela, at the University of Rochester, but she also had Hopkins connections, didn't she?

Answer: Indeed, she did! She was Ernst Cloos' daughter! In the fall of that year (1948) she would start her junior year at the U of R and we met on my first "inspection" trip there in the spring. She gave me a tour of the campus and showed me where important offices were. That was the start. We were married in summer of 1950, after I had received my Ph.D. in January. Of course her father sat on my oral examining committee and we carefully avoided telling him our personal plans until after he had cast his vote!

QUESTION 14. At Rochester, the two of you became a team in your continued studies of Middle Ordovician trilobites, focusing on their early ontogenesis and functional morphology. Could you describe those research studies and the major contributions to the understanding of trilobites?

Answer: Gisela had majored in biology and after her graduation in 1950 had a job as a lab assistant under Johannes Holtfreter, a well-known experimental embryologist, who happened to be a former student of 1935 Nobel laureate, Hans Spemann, professor at the University of Freiburg---and Gisela's grandfather! At a GSA meeting in Washington, D.C., she and I had visited Gus Cooper at the National Museum and she was enthralled by the wonderful silicified brachiopods he was studying. Back at Rochester she began etching some samples of his West Texas Permian limestones and soon she was etching Ordovician trilobites for me. Not long thereafter she told her boss, in effect, you have research money to hire an assistant, but my husband has no such support, so I'm quitting my work for you in order to be an assistant for him. That didn't make him very happy---but a year later he gave us a nice wedding present and I remained on good terms with him.

Gisela's job was the etching, washing, and sorting of the silicified residues. Her keen eyes and careful work yielded many fine specimens and she still delights in pointing out that I had suggested she throw out the very finest residues because I thought they were worthless. But she looked at them anyway and discovered early ontogenetic stages of many species the likes of which no one had ever seen before. Therein lay one of the two points of major importance of these studies: tracing the changes in segmentation and other features of morphology that characterized the long series of molt stages in the development of these organisms. Such changes, in turn, are one of the bases for evaluating the relationships between both minor and major taxa of trilobites. The other contribution was the detailed description of shell morphology which facilitated some measure of understanding of how the hard exoskeleton of these animals functioned mechanically in their physically active lives. Besides that, the great numbers of specimens of all of the many separate parts of the skeletons of many species that were piled together in some samples, made it possible to associate the different parts belonging to the different growth stages of individual species and thus facilitate their identification when encountered as occasional specimens and in often fragmented condition in their more common, non-silicified condition.

QUESTION 15. Presumably these studies led to your collaboration with Professor Harry Whittington, by that time of Harvard University, in writing the Geological Society of America Memoir 59 on silicified Middle Ordovician trilobites. How did that collaboration come about, and what were the main contributions of that Memoir?

Answer: That association had begun in 1946 when I had been invited to join him and Gus Cooper on a field trip to collect from some of the Shenandoah Valley localities other than Tumbling Run. For the next 10 years we spent much time and creative energy together, comparing notes on our discoveries and ideas and joining in two papers, one on a common Middle Ordovician and later genus, Flexicalymene, and the GSA memoir you mention, which included essentially the descriptions and interpretations of different congeneric species that we, respectively, found in our materials that were of slightly different ages, This collaboration led to a nearly 60-year friendship between us and our wives.

QUESTION 16. You have mentioned that silicified intervals began to be recognized more widely after your publications, and thus your extraction and study techniques became more important in trilobite studies. As I understand it, seeking well-preserved assemblages for your students to study also became an important part of your teaching philosophy. Would you elucidate?

Answer: I have always believed that what you can observe in well-preserved fossils is worth many times the conjectures that one must make if the specimens are less than ideal. Of course, nearly ideal specimens are not always available. However, especially for students, it seems a waste to spend time on less that the best available material on which to learn. That applies whether one is dealing with demonstration specimens for teaching or with potential material for use in dissertation research. Fortunately, in my years with trilobites and dinoflagellates enough well-preserved material has been available to supply me and most of my students.

QUESTION 17. You were also editor of the Journal of Paleontology from 1953-1956. That must have been a very time-consuming post. It certainly brought you into close contact of what was going on in paleontology during that period. What were the other major advances in paleontology in those years immediately after WW II?

Answer: What you say is certainly true. This was another of those fortunate circumstance and opportunities that came my way. At the time, the job was a nearly overpowering one. My research, and regrettably probably also my teaching, surely suffered. I served as both technical editor and managing editor, a job I acquired when the previous incumbent, Scott Warthin, relinquished it after 10 years or more. I was the last single editor. When I left Rochester and was sure I could not continue the editorship in my new position at the research lab, I turned it over to Bob Kessler (Paleozoic ostracods) and Erwin Stumm (Paleozoic corals) at the University of Minnesota. I certainly learned a lot from the job and through it I made many valuable contacts , both professional and personal, that I have enjoyed through the years.

Most of the recent advances I think you have in mind took place after my editorship. I handled a few statistical papers exploiting new ways of looking at species, a little on environmental impact on species distribution, and so on, but not the flood of new ideas and methods that followed the wide acceptance of input from molecular biology and plate tectonics. Most of the papers that passed through my hands were pretty conventional paleontology, as it had been done for many, many years. In one particular case I edited a paper whose relationship to my future I had no way of guessing at the time. That was the classic by Hoffmeister, Staplin, and Malloy in 1955, which showed how Paleozoic spores recovered by etching ordinary siliceous sediments with hydrofluoric acid, could be used for subsurface stratigraphic correlation.

QUESTION 18. To complete our review of your trilobite research, we need to fast-forward to 1976 and later to discuss your later publications on trilobites. Ronald Tripp was the co-author of these papers. Could you tell us about that collaboration, and of their rather late publication?

Answer: When I left the University of Rochester my work with trilobites essentially came to an end. However, at that point I had much prepared but unstudied silicified material and even a preliminary manuscript on a major group that was well represented in the residues. The last, short paper (on ontogeny in the Asaphidae) I completed on my own in Tulsa and it appeared in 1961, the same year as my first paper on dinoflagellate morphology and acritarch affinities. Fortunately, years later and through Harry Whittington, I made contact with Ronald P. Tripp, an able and knowledgeable Britisher who had developed the study of Ordovician trilobites as a hobby although he had no scientific training himself. Eventually, he took over all my specimens, notes, and photographs and produced a series of papers (for which he insisted upon being the junior author) on my material. The first of these was the Palaeontographica volume on trilobites of the family Encrinuridae which completed the actual text I had already begun. The rest of the papers had little contribution from me, other than the specimens, some photographs, and rough notes. I owe a great debt to him for salvaging much work and many ideas that I would certainly never have been able to publish.

QUESTION 19. When did you first learn about palynology, and when and why did you make the decision to go into that field, after having established such a distinguished reputation in trilobite research?

Answer: Bill (William S.) Hoffmeister, who had introduced palynology into the research lab of the ESSO/EXXON family of companies, was the younger brother of Ed Hoffmeister, chairman of the geology department at the U of R. On several occasions, when Bill Hoffmeister came to Rochester to visit his brother he presented an informal seminar to the geology department, telling us about this "new" field and suggesting its possibilities.

By early 1956, when I had been at the U of R for nearly 8 years, conditions in the department and university had changed to the point that, when combined with a salary that was less than was needed for a family with two small children, I was ready for a change. One of my two Ph.D. students at Rochester was expecting to receive his degree in June of 1956 and had applied to Carter Oil Company (the Tulsa-based seat of Standard Oil of New Jersey's geological research, and where Bill Hoffmeister was in the process of developing a program in palynology) for a job under Hoffmeister. When he returned to Rochester after his job interview, he spoke enthusiastically of what he had seen and learned on his trip to Tulsa. That gave me and my wife food for thought and we decided to pursue a similar possibility. So, when Bill visited Rochester in February of 1956, I put the question to him whether he might have another position in his group. Without a word, and with the impish grin that I came to know very well, he pulled an application form from his pocket and handed it to me. The rest, as they say, is history.

That is the short story of how it came about. There was a lot more to the story, but I'll just note that Bill H. had a sly sense of humor and enjoyed a good joke tremendously. Added to that is my pure speculation that there may have been an element of brotherly rivalry involved. At any rate, anyone could tell that Bill was especially tickled at having "raided" his brother's domain so effortlessly and effectively.

QUESTION 20. - Tell us about the make-up of the micropaleo group at the Carter lab when you arrived and a little about its origins.

Answer: Bill Hoffmeister, who had worked for years on forams in the Caribbean area for an affiliate of Standard Oil of New Jersey, came back to the Tulsa lab as head of the micropaleo group. Partly on the strength of consulting work that had been done for Standard Oil in South America years before by Bob Tschudy and, I think, partly because of work that Shell was doing in the Orinoco Delta, he sold management on the idea of exploring the field of palynology. L. R. Wilson (then at the University of Massachusetts and later at the University of Oklahoma) was hired as the outside expert consultant to help Bill and to guide him. At Carter, they applied the new method to studying subsurface samples of interest to the company. Convinced that the methods worked, Bill and his first two associates in palynology at Carter, Frank Staplin and Ray Malloy, worked up for publication what became their classic 1955 paper on Late Paleozoic spores in the Oklahoma subsurface. I suspect that when Bill appreciated the growing competition from Shell, he had said "Let's get something on this quickly into print" and this publication was the result. The principles that it described were already old information as far as Carter was concerned, a situation that probably explains why the company permitted the work to be published, but I'm sure Bill still had a considerable selling job to do before his higher management was convinced that the company's relatively pioneering work in the field should be made public.

When I got to Carter, Malloy had already departed for work in Peru and Staplin's move to Imperial Oil's lab in Calgary was imminent. The only persons left working with Bill in palynology were John Funkhouser and Lew Stover. John had been there several years and Lew just a few months. John, who had received a Ph.D. in biology from Stanford (thesis on South American frogs) had been introduced to palynology under Hans Thalmann, a foram specialist in the Stanford geology department who had a considerable reputation. In response to sensing the wind of palynology that was beginning to blow in the oil industry, Thalmann had set up very simple processing facilities alongside his own foram-washing ones in a tiny lab in the attic of the geology building. When John graduated and was looking for a job, Thalmann suggested he apply to Carter.

Lew had no prior experience in palynology whatsoever. His thesis at the University of Rochester had been on Devonian ostracods, but he knew of palynology through the seminars that Bill Hoffmeister had presented in his brother's department at Rochester. As I have already related, he came back to Rochester very hyped about his job interview in Tulsa, with the consequence that I went to Tulsa too a few months later.

So, for a couple of years, Bill's group consisted of John Funkhouser, Lew Stover and me in palynology, as well as Lili Ronai, a foram specialist who had come to Tulsa from Brooks Ellis' lab at the American Museum of Natural History. Then you, Harry, were the next person added to the group.

QUESTION 21. Your research at the Carter Oil Company Research Laboratory, later renamed the Jersey Production Research Company (an Exxon; i.e., renamed ESSO affiliate, for those who are unaware of the early corporate genealogy) seems to have focused quite quickly upon the dinoflagellates and acritarchs. Did you serendipitously become interested in the dinoflagellates after arriving?

Answer: One of the research projects at the Carter Lab aimed to explore the palynological content of especially well-known or important stratigraphic sections. The classic Silurian-Devonian strata of western New York State was richly fossiliferous and reasonably well dated, but nothing was known about its content of microfossils recoverable with hydrofluoric acid. So, before I moved to Tulsa, Bill Hoffmeister encouraged me to make a fairly extensive collection of samples from these strata. When I got to Tulsa, he figured that processing and studying the residues from this collection would be an effective and interesting way for me to become acquainted with this, for me, entirely new field.

When I did this, it turned out that most of the samples yielded only very poorly preserved organic microfossils wholly unfit for the sort of stratigraphic control that was desired. The exception was a short interval in the Middle Silurian Maplewood Shale. That produced great number of excellently preserved (though mostly flattened) "hystrichospheres", which was the name applied to any form of uncertain affinity that had some sort of a spiny shape. So, I concentrated on these. By the time I had slowly worked up the rest of the disappointing samples, I had become quite familiar with the techniques of preparation and study, so Bill also assigned me a "service" project that had been requested by an ESSO affiliate in Pakistan (Socony Vacuum Oil Co.). Some of the subsurface samples from there produced relatively rich and fairly to very well-preserved assemblages of spores, pollen, "hystrichospheres", and a few forms whose distinctive shape clearly identified them as dinoflagellates. These assemblages from the Albian-Maestrichtian were totally unstudied and most of the forms were new.

The objective of the Pakistan study was a microfossil zonation and it did not take long for me to realize that the marine elements in the assemblages (i.e., the dinoflagellates and "hystrichospheres") were much more promising for this purpose than the relatively much better understood terrestrial grains. With this challenge and a curiosity already aroused by the New York Silurian study, I quickly concentrated on the marine elements.

That "started the ball rolling". Here again, it was my absorption in morphologic differences that led the way. Certainly many experiences I had had---from childhood observations under my first microscope, to identifying anti-aircraft revetments under the stereoscope, to dealing with minute trilobite structures under a stereoscopic dissecting 'scope---contributed to the fascination and ability I had for this new exploration.

QUESTION 22. What were your impressions in regard to dinocyst morphology as you observed it, in comparison to the morphology of similar forms described in the literature? In other words, was it immediately apparent that there was much fundamental morphologic work to do, or did that perception come later?

Answer: It was immediately apparent. There was virtually no literature on the subject, beyond the papers of two European researchers: Alfred Eisenack, in Germany, and Georges Deflandre, in France. Their seminal papers on "hystrichospheres" from Silurian-Ordovician limestones (Eisenack) and Jurassic-Cretaceous dinoflagellates (Deflandre, from chert cobbles, mostly collected from Parisian streets). These dated mostly from the 1930s. More recently, the cooperative works of Isabelle Cookson with Deflandre and with Eisenack had begun to appear.

What was new and unexpected from my work was the large amount of evidence that was available for the looking that began to link many of the enigmatic "hystrichospheres" to the dinoflagellates and very soon suggested to me at many of these fossils represented an encysted stage of the life cycle, rather than the more familiar motile stage. Already in 1958 I could present this notion to a group of modern botanists, who visited our Tulsa lab on an excursion from their national meeting in Oklahoma City. All my work on dinoflagellates since then has been really an expansion and refinement of those ideas, which were first published in the 1961 paper, "Observations on the morphology of fossil dinoflagellates". Of course that was a very preliminary paper. While most of the basic ideas put forth in it have been sustained and have been widely accepted, quite a few of the details were simply wrong. For example, we now know that the forms that I judged to be fossil thecae of dinoflagellate motile stages (because of their strong resemblance to the known thecate stages of some modern species) are also, in fact cysts.

QUESTION 23. So, within two years, many of your most important conclusions were already formulated and being verified by you. That is remarkably rapid progress for such a fundamental piece of research. I would say more of a revolution than an evolution. How did you go about organizing this research to obtain such far-reaching results so quickly?

Answer: I tried to organize the results of my research but I'm afraid I never succeeded in organizing its execution. Actually, my conclusions presented in 1961 were almost self-evident to any careful observer. One observation simply led to another and, starting with a typical "hystrichosphere" one was led by small morphological steps to an "obvious" dinoflagellate. The essentials, of course, were having well-preserved material to work with, assemblages with widely diverse taxa, and large numbers of individuals Only this way could one hope to see and explore the morphology and overcome the problems presented by an unusually great intraspecific variation. In retrospect it all appears very simple, and I must admit that most of my work over the next 25 years was, essentially, "beating the same drum".

QUESTION 24. What was the principal evidence for the important insight that some of the "hystrichospheres" are dinoflagellate cysts?

Answer: Two features: tabulation patterns and the archeopyle (then called "pylome"). The outer cellulosic (and, in some cases, siliceous) covering (theca) of many dinoflagellates in their swimming stage is divided into a number of separable, polygonal plates. These patterns (tabulation) have long been recognized by modern biologists as taxonomic features highly useful for distinguishing genera and species. Some of the patterns I found on the fossil specimens, although often incompletely expressed, had an impressive similarity to patterns in living dinos. It seemed to me inescapable that the clearest of the fossil examples were truly dinoflagellates, a conclusion also supported by the distinctive shape of some forms. However, there were certain "peculiarities" about these patterns. Many were defined, not by separation between actual "plates" but by projecting elements of surface ornament whose distribution or emphasis mimicked such tabulation patterns. And, some specimens---even ones with strongly dinoflagellate-like shape---had no traces of these patterns. The "clincher" was the morphology of the aperture in the otherwise tough and unbroken organic wall of the fossils that seemed to be the only available way by which the living cell could emerge from its confines. Regardless of the ornamentation, I observed that this opening often had the precise shape one would expect if its location had indeed been determined by the limits of the adjacent plates.

Gradually the evidence accumulated that this was the reasonable and inescapable conclusion. However, it must always be emphasized, that these ideas have never been applied to all the fossils called "hystrichospheres"! The forms we are talking about here are almost exclusively Mesozoic and more recent ones. That's why I proposed the term "acritarch" as a catch-all for those "hystrichospheres" that show no, or quite uncertain evidence of having been dinoflagellates. This varied group of "unknowns" includes forms from pre-Cambrian to Recent age. Many are now recognized as cysts of other (i.,e., non-dinoflagellate) algal taxa. The term "hystrichosphere" became inappropriate for them when it became clear that species of the genus Hystrichosphera (the basis for the informal term) were, in fact, dinoflagellate cysts.

QUESTION 25. In your 1961 paper you thought many of the fossil dinos were motile dinoflagellates. Later you came to the conclusion that they were all cysts. What was the evidence that convinced you that all those forms were cysts rather than thecae?

Answer: At the time that I was first working on dinoflagellattes, there was a small number of papers that had documented that this group had a fossil record. These papers, largely by Georges Deflandre, included some spectacular forms with outspoken similarity to living dinos. For example, Palaeoperidinium pyrophorum was the "spitting image" of some living forms now referred to Protoperidinium. Ignoring the fact that the delicate cellulosic plates of a motile cell's theca were not likely to be fossilized, these fossils were simply accepted as fossil dinos. It was the forms like Hystrichosphaera and Hystrichosphaeridium that were not recognized as dinos that intrigued me. So a first step in my thinking was to recognize that these "spiny balls"---at least a large number of them from the Mesozoic---had morphological features that indicated they had formed inside a theca and my interpretation was that they were non-motile cysts. It was only gradually, as more and more morphotypes were discovered, that it became apparent that a complete gradation existed, from the spiny ball at one end to the obvious dinoflagellate at the other, and that the morphology of all of them indicated a similar formation, inside the motile theca. Ultimately we learned that this was not strictly true.

We now believe that some fossils dinoflagellates, while correctly interpreted as non-motile and organic-walled structures, actually formed outside the cellulosic theca. Interestingly, the evidence for this conclusion was not recognized until many, many years later and was reported in the paper on Palaeoperidinium pyrophorum that I wrote with Sarah Damassa and Nairn Albert (1998). This species is the "most obvious" dinoflagellate among all the fossils ever attributed to the group and has a story I find remarkable. It was the very first fossil ever recognized as a dinoflagellate, by Ehrenberg in 1836, who simply referred it to the then well known genus Peridinium. A hundred years passed before it was first clearly described by Deflandre in 1936. Yet, only recently have we deciphered what it's going on with its morphology and there is still much to learn about the implications of our discovery. It's "peculiarity" lies in that these cysts appear to have formed outside of the theca instead of inside the theca. It was almost the end of the 20th century before we had the cumulative morphological and technological tools to recognize that. Furthermore, we believe that this is just the most obvious of many fossil dinoflagellates that have already been described whose similar nature has not yet been generally recognized, So it remains for workers in the new century to work out the whole story.

QUESTION 26. Your diagrammatic illustration of a hypothetical motile theca surrounding a specimen of Hystrichosphaeridium became an icon of the relationship between the dinoflagellates and some hystrichospheres. It seems to be a very difficult three dimensional exercise to get the hypothetical dinoflagellate plates aligned and fitted to the process pattern of the hystichosphere. How did you achieve that?

Answer: I attribute that to my experience in studying small and intricately formed features under the microscope. Under a non-stereoscopic instrument, one must mentally construct an impression of the third dimension because the limited depth of the focus prevents its direct perception. This quickly becomes "old hat" to a biologist who is accustomed to examining serial thin sections of animal or plant tissue, but it takes practice. It helps if one can occasionally verify one's impression of the third dimension by viewing an inflated specimen under a stereoscopic microscope. In the case of the plate arrangement in dinoflagellates like Hystrichosphaeridium, the correlation of process position with thecal plate geometry and position was a long time in becoming absolutely convincing. Eventually some species showed up in which the expanded tips of the trumpet-like projections were clearly polygonal in outline, and of exactly the shapes required by the thecal plates in their respective positions.

QUESTION 27. How would you compare the research atmosphere and resource capabilities between academia and industry at that time?

Answer: In some companies it was fantastically favorable and in some academic institutions is was miserable. But there was great variation at both ends of the spectrum. Clearly money made the difference, for even where there was the will there were often no funds. The research atmosphere at the Jersey lab was exceptional. For me it was like having an academic research job with no teaching and little administrative responsibility. For that I consider myself to have been exceedingly fortunate. Events that unfolded before I left Jersey showed that in important measure that atmosphere was dependent on the philosophy of the immediate and higher managers.

QUESTION 28. The focus today in industry is for the paleontologist to function within a multidisciplinary exploration team, and acting also to assure quality control from the service companies that provide the raw data. The paleontologists training needs to be much broader than previously, but personal experience in accumulating the data is sacrificed. How do you evaluate the implications of these changes in industry to future research and applications to the oil industry?

Answer: I think the implications may be good for the bottom line, at least temporarily, but very bad for basic research. For the kind of work that I did you don't need a jack-of-all-trades. The important discoveries that will advance our knowledge into the previously unknown will always come from the "dedicated" scientist or at least the investigator who is free to explore the leads presented to him by the occasional critical observation or serendipitous event.

QUESTION 29. In 1959 your paper on palynological techniques written in collaboration with John Funkhouser appeared in Micropaleontology. This paper described, in detail, some rather advanced palynological processing techniques used at that time. One must admire the foresightedness of Jersey in permitting the release of a combination of techniques that might have been considered competitive. Did you ever have any problems in publishing the results of your fundamental research? It certainly wasn't a widespread industry practice. To whom do you credit these enlightened policies?

Answer: I (we) never had any difficulty, only encouragement. That was due to the powerful personal influence of Bill Hoffmeister. Although his administrative position at Jersey was low, he had seniority in the company far beyond that of most of his superiors. Added to that he had great persuasive talents. Like his Rochester brother, he had a very warm, approachable, and friendly manner---also a highly developed sense of humor. He knew how to use his power well and he strongly believed that everyone---company, industry, academic---would benefit by free flow of information in this rapidly developing field of palynology. I never knew of such battles behind the scene as there must have been. He was protective of his group's ability to concentrate on their work and, I think, may even have enjoyed the chance to test wits with management.

QUESTION 30. In 1959, you went on an extended trip to Europe to study with the pioneer researchers on fossil dinoflagellates, such as Alfred Eisenack and Georges Deflandre. What were your goals of that trip, and to what extent were they achieved?

Answer: I was sent to Europe by the Jersey lab management specifically to spend a month each with Eisenack and Deflandre. I had suggested this undertaking when asked how I thought we should further exploit the possibilities of fossil dinoflagellates for petroleum exploration. My goal was to learn what I could from these two older scientists who had produced what was then most of the literature on the subject I was interested in.

It happened that, by the time I made the trip, I had already formulated some ideas about dinoflagellates and "hystrichospheres" that were in strong contrast to their interpretations. So, in addition to studying the specimens in their collections, which was an extremely educational and rewarding experience, I tried out my somewhat heretical ideas on them---with interesting results!

QUESTION 31. Could you share with us any anecdotes about the researchers you met on that trip? It is often enlightening to gain some personal impressions of those of whom, some of us, were acquainted with solely through their scientific contributions.

Answer: Both gentlemen received me graciously and openly and in each case our brief time led to a long friendship and extensive correspondence in later years. Both made outstanding contributions and they deserve all the credit and recognition that came, and may yet come, their way. They were two very different people, with different backgrounds, different attitudes, and different abilities. Bill Sarjeant's memorial to Eisenack and mine to Deflandre provide the English reader some insight into their personal histories and work.

Eisenack was trained and employed through his life as a chemist and secondary school teacher. He was self-taught in paleontology and biology. His work on organic microfossils stemmed from his curiosity to discover what could be recovered from glacial erratics of Paleozoic limestone that he found on the North German Plain, scooped up from the floor of the Baltic Sea. He found lots, and did his best to make his discoveries known. His appreciation of the importance of stratigraphic provenance was not high, but then there was no possibility of seeing the section from which his samples mostly came. Later he applied similar techniques to younger sediments with similarly productive results. His many papers with Isabelle Cookson were based on her collection, processing, and photography, and his---and, certainly, to some extent--- joint descriptive taxonomy. During parts of both world wars he had been imprisoned by the Russians and his health showed the effects. Personally he was a very warm and generous person, but there was a bit of stereotypical German stubbornness in him and he was not very welcoming to new ideas contrary to his own. His ready response to a suggested revision in interpretation of evidence was a true, if somewhat frustrating "Time will tell", rather than a thoroughgoing discussion of the evidence. It was many years before he fully acknowledged (fully accepted?) that many "hystrichospheres" were dinoflagellates. He published extensively, but on limited topics. His strong tendency was to prepare some material, study it, find out what was new in it, write a manuscript, and go on to the next. One had the feeling that there was a sort of "steady state" to his research, in which 90 percent of his observations and ideas were always already in print. His limited professional credentials as a research scientist and professor were a great handicap in the rigid German educational system. Although he was respected and appreciated by individuals, his standing in the academic community, I think, was limited.

Deflandre was a trained microbiologist but he was, through and through, a scientist with highest standards. I think he probably had a photographic memory; at least his powers of retention and recollection were incredible. I think, with little exaggeration, he could put his finger at once on any specimen he had every seen, because all were recorded somewhere with slide number, location, and coordinates. He had many talents: he painted with oils and played several musical instruments, including the violin, cello, piano and organ. Nevertheless, he lived for his research; at any rate he took little time for sheer relaxation. He had a highly organized file of thousands of slides on everything from modern microalgae, to fossil chitinozoans, to obscure groups such as ebriidians and archaeomonads, (on which he wrote detailed and definitive works). He was a powerfully inquisitive and able collector and describer of species. He had no training as a geologist and--- much more than Eisenack---knew and, I believe, cared little about stratigraphic sources of his specimens. It was quite enough to record such as "Senonian chert, driveway to Wanda Landowska's house---the noted harpsichordist and friend where he went for a musical gathering. He was meticulous, amazingly well organized, with files full of unpublished notes, descriptions and observations. For every page that he published, there must have been hundreds of pages of unpublished notes in his files. He did not take mediocrity lightly and was quite outspoken in his judgment of the ability of others---which, of course, grew enemies like weeds in the ambitious and regulated French scientific establishment. Consequently he was never admitted to full membership in the French Academy, despite numerous attempts. To me he was kind and exceedingly cooperative in opening his collection to my study and spending time with me in discussion. In contrast to Eisenack, he welcomed my new ideas, to which he responded with many personal efforts to help amass evidence that might bear on the matter. In my own experience his most disturbing quality was that his respect for knowledge for the sake of knowledge led to a conviction that any observation should be open to public scrutiny and testing. Thus, it was a bit disconcerting to find opinions expressed tentatively in private correspondence appearing---with acknowledgment, to be sure---in the next item of his ever-expanding bibliography. That tended to put a damper on the free exchange of information.

Let me stress that these opinions are mine and are based on very limited contacts in very special circumstances; some may be grossly incorrect or unfair. Overall, I have the greatest respect for these men and a appreciation for their many kindnesses to me.

It was on this trip that I made the acquaintance of three other persons with whom I later had much to do. I met Charles Downie (Professor of Geology at Sheffield University) and Bill Sarjeant (one of his students) on a short visit to Sheffield on the way to Germany. The published record---the Downie-Evitt-Sarjeant acritarch classification--- only hints at the extent of my long relationship with Bill Sarjeant which was carried out mostly in extensive correspondence. The third person, who became a very close friend and highly respected colleague, was Hans Gocht. At the time he had a menial job preparing forams at a small north German oil company, but he had already published, completely on his own, a couple of short papers on dinos. Fortunately for our field, he came to the attention of Eisenack who encouraged him to go back to school for his Abitur. Thereafter he worked and studied under Eisenack at the University of Tubingen and ultimately occupied a permanent position there. He was a meticulous worker with great talent and his contributions to the study dinoflagellates are among the very best. That his colleagues and associates recognize this is clearly shown by the Festschrift volume of the Neues Jahrbuch Abandlungen that was published in 2001 to honor him on his seventieth birthday. I was humbled to be invited to contribute a manuscript to this work and am happy to have my last paper on dinos a part of this volume.

QUESTION 32. Your early research wasn't limited to dinoflagellates. As I recall, you discovered a spore from a vascular plant from the middle Silurian Maplewood Shale of western New York that was among the oldest, if not the oldest, then described. Bill Hoffmeister also discovered a Silurian spore from Libya, so researchers were beginning to push back vascular plant origins in the late 1950's. Do you remember the chronology of those discoveries, and the circumstances of your own discovery?

Answer: I don't think that my observations, which came after Bill Hoffmeister's and some others, did more than reinforce the observations they had made. There were some reasonably well-preserved spores in the New York material, but the variety was quite limited .

QUESTION 33. In 1962, you left the Jersey Production Research Company for a 6-month teaching assignment at Stanford, which evolved into your permanent return to academia. What were your considerations in making the move, beyond the magnificent climate we experience near the California coastline?

Answer: My considerations were several. Basically, while I welcomed the experience in industry that the years in Tulsa provided, I knew that my love of teaching---the ability to share with others some of the knowledge, observations, and speculations that you consider important---would one day bring me back to full-time academic work. As we recovered financially and I felt that my future course in palynology was securely laid, I increasingly missed the relationship with students. In the immediate sense my decision to accept the offer I had unexpectedly received from Stanford was triggered by developments that quickly followed Bill Hoffmeister's retirement during the months I was at Stanford. The writing on the wall told me that, once Bill Hoffmeister's protective shield was gone, any change in management could have devastating effects on his program. I think, events soon proved me correct. Had I not made the change back to academia then, I surely would have made some kind of basic change to avoid the move to Houston that followed the demise of Jersey Production Research and merger with the Houston lab of Humble Oil to form a new company (Exxon Production Research) in Texas. I left Jersey with great appreciation for the opportunities and support that had been given me and high respect for the quality of work that had been done there.

QUESTION 34. Lew Stover stepped into your considerably large shoes at Jersey, and spearheaded continued research and applications for the Exxon Company. As a former student, you must have been very proud of Lew's contribution to dinocyst research and applications.

Answer: My association with Lew began when he came to Rochester as a new graduate student in 1952. It was an extremely close and amicable professional one and a very warm personal one through the rest of his life. From the start we were friends and colleagues, exploring the unknown together, no matter whether the field was Devonian ostracods (his thesis research), coccoliths, or palynology. We had many shared interests and points of view. He was a great paleontologist, with interests far broader and talents far more diversely developed than mine. I was---and am!---not so much "proud of" his contributions as joyful to have had the good fortune to have shared so many months and years of my life in proximity to his activities and accomplishments.

QUESTION 35. When you moved to Stanford, you moved to a province in which palynomorph recovery and preservation were known to be rather poor, because of the deep weathering profile in an arid climate. How did you attack that problem, and what proved to be the best sources of samples for you and your students?

Answer: In part I was ignorant of how severe the weathering problem was. Of course, I soon found out. One solution was to do a lot of looking. I insisted that my students refuse to spend time on mediocre material and many potentially interesting studies were rejected on the grounds of poor preservation. For the most part we recognized that we were, so to speak, "on the cutting edge" of our studies. We had the luxury of being able to design our own projects and of choosing the best materials we could find. We did not have to crank out answers to someone else's questions. We also were not restricted in our choice of sources.

Since communication between Stanford geologists and other geologists working in the area was excellent, I immeditely let it be known at the USGS branch in nearby Menlo Park and elsewhere that I would be happy to process any samples they would care to submit if they thought palynomorphs might aid their investigations---after making clear to them what hand-specimen appearance held out the best prospects for recovering usable specimens of palynomorphs. This brought a dwindling flow of responses over the years, but some very productive ones. The most exciting ones were from the coastal range west of the Sacramento Valley and northward into Oregon. Much of this terrane had been thought relatively unfossiliferous, with only a few tantalizing indications of Mesozoic age and many dates that had been applied were sheerly speculative. However, we found some fine Tertiary assemblages of dinoflagellates, as indicated in a paper with Sarah Damassa and which she later described in much more detail. Today many view this area as a complex of accreted bits with many distant provenances. At Stanford, Ben Page (then chairman of the department, with a career of experience in California geology) and his students were especially interested in poorly dated materials closer to Stanford. The excavations for the Stanford Linear Accelerator gave us access to much previously unexposed material which yielded some early Tertiary dinoflagellates, but the preservation was usually too poor for useful study.

One local problem that never yielded to "palynological attack" was the stratigraphy of the Monterey Shale which had nettled California geologists for years. With some calcareous layers and much silicification---from siliceous skeletons, which must have been present in great abundance---that were accessible from many exposures and well cuttings, it seemed an attractive target. In many attempts I was able to obtain some dinoflagellates, but far too limited in variety and too poorly preserved to be useful.

Some of my students arrived at Stanford with ideas of where they would like to work or did some preliminary exploration and testing of areas suggested to them, both in California and elsewhere. During my six months at Stanford in 1961 I had discovered that the Late Cretaceous strata in central California contained many horizons with phosphatic concretions and these proved to be a "gold mine" of fine specimens (Jeff Stein's Ph.D. thesis and John Kokinos' master's on dinoflagellates and Carol Chmura's thesis and Palaeontographica monograph on angiosperm pollen). Lower Cretaceous limestones in northern California were the basis for John Warren's Ph.D. Although never published in its entirety his dissertation became remarkably widely known among palynologists through Xerox copies of text and photographic copies of his plates.

Since my own research depended on specimens more than provenance or stratigraphy, my choices of materials were wide open. I made the most of the interesting morphologies that came to light in my students' studies. I took advantage of field trips associated with national meetings to look for and collect interesting materials (e.g., Maryland and New Jersey Coastal Plain, Kansas Cretaceous, Texas Cretaceous/Tertiary). I also obtained some highly instructive samples from colleagues and I continued to draw on material which I still possessed from when I was at the Jersey lab. For example, an astounding sample that taught me more, perhaps, than any other material I ever encountered, was a little glass vial of 90 percent dinoflagellate concentrate that Deflandre had given me in 1959. It had been prepared many years before by Walter Wetzel. He was an amateur micropaleontologist in Kiel, Germany who (in the late 20s) extracted organic microplanktonic fossils with HCl from calcareous beds in the north German Oligocene. Some he described in two Paleontographica monographs in 1933, long before their dinoflagellate affinities were recognized. He had such rich concentrates that he "bottled" them, sold some and distributed others to colleagues. Deflandre had been kind enough to give me a small cut of his supply.

By very good coincidence, I benefited from a remarkable collection of unprepared samples at Stanford that had been gathered many years before for forams from classic localities in the U.S. and Europe. This was largely the work of Hubert Schenk, Stanford paleontologist and stratigrapher who had died shortly after the Second World War. These were contained in hundreds of shoe boxes, carefully filed and indexed, and readily accessible in the attic of the geology building. I explored this collection systematically (but never to the end!) and found some amazing material, of which multiple samples from the London Clay stand out in my mind. Also in the attic were extensive cuttings and a few core samples from early California oil wells, some of which were very informative.

QUESTION 36. Tell us a little about the faculty and geology program at Stanford and the changes you witnessed during the years there. What was your role in the department?

Answer: The department at Stanford was strong in several fields and had a long tradition and lingering strength in paleontology/stratigraphy. I came to assist in the "soft-rock" program at both graduate and undergraduate levels, partly in anticipation of the retirement of some senior faculty. Through the years, in addition to graduate level palynology, I taught an undergraduate paleontology and a survey course in vertebrate history. On the administrative side I served for many years as chairman of the graduate admissions committee and for a shorter time as associate chairman of the department, along with sundry other "housekeeping" duties.

One of the major changes that I witnessed was the gradual drying up of government money in support of student and faculty research, for example in the form of grants from the National Science Foundation. Needless to say, this had a severe effect on the research program and student financing. Another was an increase in strength in mineralogy/petrology and structural geology, as well as the appearance and expansion of basin studies and environmental geology. This was accompanied by great decline in attention to paleontology and "ordinary" stratigraphy. Today there is only one person on the faculty trained in paleontology and the word "paleontology" does not appear in the list of course offerings. Palynology as a formal part of the program came and went with my tenure. The modern department is a very strong one. It has incorporated many advances in technological methods applicable to geology and has a much-expanded faculty and range of expertise, with an important environmental component. Of course, I hate to see the complete demise of paleontology as a field of specialization.

QUESTION 37. The Loma Prieto earthquake inflicted significant damage to the geology department building at Stanford. How did this impact the palynology program?

Answer: Not at all! By that time I had retired and the palynology at Stanford program had ended with the departure of my last graduate students, and I had no successor. However, the damage to the building resulted in its closing for a period of years and removal of all activities to other existing space and to quickly constructed "temporaries," long since vacated by geologists but still there and in full use by others.

QUESTION 38. You also had significant damage in your home, which must have been quite frightening. Could you describe that as well? Where were you and Gisela when the earthquake struck?

Answer: The most succinct record of the quake was a six-inch long scar scratched on the floor of our living room by a sharp point on the base of a heavy oak chest. Obviously its inertia had held it still while the house moved beneath it. Another involved a large bookcase---subsequently secured to the wall!---which had "rocked" onto a large iron key and ground that into the wooden counter below. The key, however, caused the bookcase to incline just enough back toward the wall that the books did not empty onto the floor. We suffered cracks in stucco on the outside and plaster on the inside and a great deal of breakage in china and glassware, largely because much of it had recently been placed on temporary open shelves during some renovation that had just been completed. Gisela and I were away on a trip at the time and returned a week later to find that one of our sons and his wife had cleaned up the broken debris after first taking some impressive pictures. Interestingly, our immediate neighbor had a collapsed chimney and broken picture windows, but a few doors away the most that happened was a lamp on the floor and pictures askew.

QUESTION 39. Would you tell us about the archeopyle paper? Since your earliest publications regarding fossil dinocysts, recognized archeopyle types have increased from 3 to 4, to many. Has the variety of archeopyles surprised you, and which type was the most unexpected?

Answer: In 1965 John Warren began his study of Early Cretaceous dinos and we started to tally each new type of archeopyle as they came to light in our two projects. The number grew rapidly and has continued to grow, at a much reduced pace of course, to today. The most surprising were a few that have showed up in the posterior part of the cyst (but were described only in an abstract with Roger Witmer) because all the types found earlier were in the anterior part.

QUESTION 40. You initiated a very popular series of two-week seminars at Stanford University, initially for petroleum palynologists, which you later extended to overseas venues. What was the purpose of these seminars?

Answer: In 1969 John Bennett from ARCO came to Stanford for two-weeks of tutoring on dinoflagellate morphology. That gave me the idea that perhaps there would be others who would be interested in such training. So, in 1971 I gave the first, and what I expected to be the only session, to a group of five palynologists from industry. To make a short story out of a very long one, I was wrong. I gave the last such course in England 17 years later. That was the 36th session and there had been a total of more than 230 participants. Each session (of five to eight participants) involved approximately 80 hours spent at the microscope and in discussions about as many aspects of dinoflagellate morphology and taxonomic principles as we could get in.

Of course, those years saw many developments in the state of collective knowledge on the subject and the course changed drastically to keep up. The first sessions were held at Stanford outside the academic schedule, in summers or between terms. However, eight of them were held elsewhere (Texas, Norway, England, Scotland, and Holland). They were all given on a consulting basis, independent of Stanford's involvement, except for the important matter of providing space and facilities for the ones given here. For me this undertaking had fantastic benefits. Not only were these exciting and educational experiences for me at which I became acquainted with many palynologists I would not otherwise have known, but also I could spend my time free of academic responsibilities, doing what I most enjoyed---teaching and learning about dinos---instead of having to turn to other ways of putting three sons through college.

QUESTION 41. One very positive outcome of your research and of those seminars was the stabilization of dinocyst taxonomy. Were there competing classification schemes in areas such as the Soviet Union, that might have not had easy access to Western publications?

Answer: Communication among those involved with fossil dinoflagellates in the Americas and western Europe was sufficient to keep all of us more or less abreast of developments. Although that was not true for eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, no great volume of literature on fossil dinos was being produced there. The principal contributor in the USSR was Maria Vozzhennikova, whose ideas, viewed in retrospect, were somewhat behind the times---a condition that has now been remedied by the significant efforts of Judy Lentin.

QUESTION 42. Another very positive outcome of the seminars was that your classification seemed to me to more closely approach a natural classification, thereby shortening dinocyst stratigraphic ranges. This resulted in the dinocysts becoming one of the most useful microfossil forms for stratigraphic applications. Were you surprised at the impact your work had on stratigraphic applications?

Answer: It was certainly very gratifying to see how rapidly the ability to see and use previously unappreciated morphological features spread. As far as contributing to a more "natural" classification is concerned, I'd say that progress in that direction will always depend on more acute and more thorough observation of morphology. It's good that many are now taking steps toward that end. I think the Taylor-Evitt classification has much unrealized potential, but at this relatively early stage in its testing it contains difficulties and uncertainties (and, no doubt, some errors) that make it difficult for the non-specialist to judge and to use. Great credit for progress toward stabilization at taxonomic levels above species and genus must go to Max Taylor and Rob Fensome and their comprehensive classification.

QUESTION 43. You taught a very popular survey course on fossil vertebrates at Stanford. Could you tell us how that interesting tangent of your career developed?

Answer: In 1964 contract excavators of a great trench for the Stanford Linear Accelerator (on Stanford land a mile or so from the campus) encountered a nearly complete skeleton of a large Miocene aquatic mammal (Palaeoparadoxia). Work on the excavation was halted and a team of geologists from Stanford, the USGS and other interested parties cooperated on its removal, cleaning, and eventual reassembly and mounting (of casts of the bones) in one of the Linear Accelerator buildings. This discovery aroused considerable student interest. While my knowledge of fossil vertebrates was minimal, to say the least, I had devoted a few lectures in my year-long paleo course at the University Rochester to a quick survey of their evolution, and I offered to expand this for a one-quarter review for the general college student. This was planned as a one-time delivery, but it proved popular and, actually, was repeated 15 times over the next 20 years.

QUESTION 44. The development of plate tectonic theory was occurring during your early years at Stanford (1960's, 1970's). What memories do you have of this scientific revolution at Stanford?

Answer: Although I was not directly involved, it was certainly a topic of lively local interest. There were many seminars and journal presentations on various aspects of the subject as well as direct involvement by our structural, petrologic, and sedimentation geologists. Outstanding were the presentations and courses by Bill Dickinson, who was then a member of our department before his move to the University of Arizona. In subsequent years faculty with those same interests developed research programs all over the world, focused on sea floor spreading, deposition in tectonic basins, and so on, all related to the spin-off from the plate tectonic revolution.

QUESTION 45. Throughout your career techniques for preparing, studying, and handling the specimens you have dealt with have been an important consideration to you. Would you tell us about some of them?

Answer: Techniques are critical at every step of paleontological study, no matter the size, composition or biological relationships of the object of attention. There's always a better way of doing almost anything, and trying new ways to do what I have wanted to do has always fascinated me. Let me list some examples that worked (without details on their sometimes lengthy development):

The small silicified trilobites I first studied were extremely delicate, once liberated from their matrix. To sort them from associated unwanted residue under a dissecting 'scope required a delicate touch. The problem was solved by gluing the blunt base of an eyelash to a dissecting needle and using the absolutely micron-sharp tip of the flexible hair to touch and move the specimens. Decades later, I used the same eyelash technique in drops of water or glycerin to maneuver choice isolated specimens of dinoflagellates that were an order of magnitude smaller than the trilobites.

The familiar licked paintbrush of the foram picker would not work for transferring these porous bits of silicified trilobites to cavity slides or for mounting them to be photographed because the surface tension of the "lick" was strong enough to break them before they could be released from the brush. My solution was inspired when I appreciated the structure of a colorful straw in a mint julep I was sipping one hot Maryland summer day, I stripped out the very thin decorative strand of aluminum that was buried in the cellophane, then glued two short sections of this to the ends of a pair of tweezers, and used these flexible extensions to gently pick up and easily release even the most delicate specimens.

These trilobites were highly three-dimensional and had irregular shapes, seemingly seldom with a position of rest in the orientation desirable for study or photography. My father and I produced a three-axis stage that could be used under the microscope or camera to orient a specimens glued---with the aid of eyelash and aluminum tweezers---to the point of an insect pin (the head was too gross) which was, in turn, secured in the lead-holder of a sacrificed drawing instrument. Many trilobites for study, and all that I photographed, were oriented this way.

Physical "reconstruction" of dissociated trilobite skeletons was achieved by mounting two or more suitably sized specimens (which were certainly not from the same individual) each on a "springy" piece of hair, bringing the oh-so-breakable fossil parts together under a microscope and judiciously placing a minidrop of glue to hold them together.

When I joined the Jersey lab, the processing procedures then in use were truly primitive. John Funkhouser and I (separately and also assisted by a very able and imaginative laboratory technician) tackled the problem. We adopted gravity separation in saturated zinc chloride solution (later zinc bromide, for its higher specific gravity), turned to water-soluble mountants in preference to balsam and the like, and used "swirling" in a watchglass to separate organic remains of only slightly different effective densities.

Toward the end of my program at Stanford, I made an "oven" in which trays of fresh slides prepared with a UV-sensitive monomer as a mounting medium (for cementing optical lens elements together, and suggested to me by Tony Bint) could be hardened, by the aluminum trayful, under UV-tubes.

When working on my last paper (Palaeoperidinium ) with Sarah Damassa and Nairn Albert, we needed really convincing evidence that the spectacular ornament on these forms was actually on the inside of the cyst wall where we felt sure it was a "negative" of the relief on the originally exterior thecal surface. Such a relationship between cyst and theca had never been observed before and, of course, we couldn't call back the theca. Using sharp needle and an eyelash in a water drop I dissected a favorable section of cyst wall, turned it inside up and let it dry. Then I added a drop of the aforementioned monomer, polymerized it under UV light, peeled away from the cyst wall the film thus created and took stereo SEM photos of this fine "regenerated thecal surface".

QUESTION 46. At the Jersey Production Research Company, you developed a very extensive card file of published descriptions and illustrations of fossil dinoflagellates, and continued to keep it current at Stanford. Did you consider publishing it as a taxonomic reference guide, in the manner of the various Catalogues of Foraminifera, Ostracoda, and Nannofossils?

Answer: The availability of relevant literature is, of course, essential in any research situation. At the Jersey lab we began physically abstracting all the taxonomic literature we could obtain, making alphabetically arranged filing cards with the full text and illustrations for essentially all the species and genera we knew about. When I left Jersey this file amounted to around a thousand cards and I was permitted to take the original set with me, leaving behind a copy. At Stanford I continued (with the help of a succession of clerical assistants) to expand the file until, at the time I retired, I think it contained over 10,000 cards. The value to me and my students was incalculable. I did, indeed, consider publishing it and made preliminary inquiries. However, just then electronic affordable means of copying, duplicating, and distributing text and photographs were being developed. Before long it was obvious that such a slow and costly method of literature access was no longer practical and nothing came of my plans. However, the file as it existed at the end of my activity (i.e., covering from the "beginnings" of fossil dinoflagellate taxonomy in the 1930s to the mid-1980s) still serves Javier Helenes and his students at CICESE in Ensenada, Mexico. ---On a related note, my entire reprint collection is now a part of the CENEX palynological library at LSU.

QUESTION 47. What was the extent of your involvement with living dinoflagellates and what did you learn from them?

Answer: My encounters with modern dinoflagellates chiefly involved just three sources and were very limited in scope. Two of these were in California, the third in Massachusetts. The one field excursion that was a part of all the dinoflagellate short courses I gave at Stanford was to the two local localities within easy reach from Stanford. Returning to the lab we would all look at the day's "catch". For most of the participants, this was their first sight of a live and moving dinoflagellate. Many delighted in seeing these cells spiraling through the water, especially---as I had as a child with my first microscope---the fascinating twisting movements of Ceratium as it first advanced and then untwisted in reverse.

Shortly after I came to Stanford, when Susan Davidson (later Thomas) was my lab assistant, we obtained a plankton net, thinking we should see what could be found in the local Pacific and nearby lakes. I was away on a trip when the first net arrived and Susan took it to the coast and got a sample of plankton from a rock promontory along the shore. When I returned she had already discovered and prepared slides of fresh and HF-processed material and showed me the first modern cysts either of us had ever seen. That prompted careful study of the material and led to the breathtaking discovery of an organic-walled cyst of Hystrichosphaera still inside a partly broken away theca of Gonyaulax. Here was documentation of my speculation about the basic relationship of fossil cysts to their motile-stage thecae. We published (1964) a short paper noting this, but, unfortunately, in the two decades that followed I was never able to repeat such a find. So, our very inferior and hasty photomicrograph of the object could never be bettered. However, I did subsequently learn much about cyst-theca relationships in species of Protoperidinium from the coastal samples, although I never published my observations. I also learned a great deal about the form and tabulation patterns of many living species and genera from this material.

The second "brush" with modern species was in freshwater plankton samples from local ponds and reservoirs. Here I found several species of Ceratium, represented at different times by great numbers of living and very active thecate individuals and, much less frequently, by cysts, which occurred both inside thecae and separately. More than one of these samples left untended for some days on the lab bench, ended up having produced great numbers of encysted cells. My experience with Ceratium was the basis for a collaboration with David Wall in a substantial paper on fossil ceratioids (1975) in which we tried to apply some of our observations to fossil examples that had been described by others.

The third was also by way of collaboration with Dave Wall in studying specimens of freshwater Peridinium cysts that he had collected from ponds near the site of his laboratory at Woods Hole. These were fine examples of isolated cyst and thecae and of cysts still enclosed in their thecae. Thus the physical relationships of the various walls were clear and the patterns and structures we saw were strongly suggestive of some familiar to us from fossil cysts. This study did much to confirm interpretations that to that point were largely hypothetical.

QUESTION 48. How did Stover and Evitt (1978) come to be? I remember Bill and Lew working on the index at Stanford while I was a student there (pre-1976).

Answer: As more and more papers appeared describing ever-increasing numbers of new taxa, it was inevitable that some taxonomic revision would be necessary. Lew and I were constantly frustrated as this need became acute and simply decided to do something about it.

QUESTION 49. You had many other collaborators in your extensive list of palynological publications. Can you cite a few that were particularly productive, and tell us why?

Answer: I have mentioned Susan Davidson, Dave Wall, and Lew Stover. My only publication on acritarchs (and my only, halting and feeble, touch on statistics) was with Jean Deunff, a Frenchman at the University of Rheims whom I never met. We joined forces to explore the variation in a Silurian form he had described from a few specimens and which I had found in the New York Middle Silurian in great numbers. This was an especially interesting example of the intraspecific variation characteristic of many acritarchs.

Just after I came to Stanford I learned of a proposed classification of "hystrichospheres" (i.e., our current acritarchs) that was being developed by Charles Downie and Bill Sarjeant in Britain. Eventually we produced a morphologic classification of these forms so common and diverse in the early to middle Paleozoic. This has generally stood the test of time rather well---maybe because no one else has wanted to touch this "can of worms". Fortunately, the numbers of fossils referred to the "Group Acritarcha" has diminished as many of its original members have been assigned to recognized taxa in the biological classification.

A group that I struggled with for an entire summer and returned to occasionally and always unsatisfactorily thereafter were cysts suggestive of the living genus Gymnodinium. Along the way I discovered that Jean-Pierre Verdier and Bob Clark (French and English, respectively) were on to some of the same problems. So we pooled efforts. This is a challenging group of fossils, frustrating in its erratic occurrence in any great numbers. But I am sure it has an important story to tell. It just may be an example of a fossil motile stage and, thus, a real novelty. But that needs much more exploration and better evidence.

QUESTION 50. When and how did you begin to collaborate with Max Taylor? (Penrose, or before?) I don't think I ever saw you more excited over a new idea than you were when you and Max were working on the Taylor-Evitt tabulation scheme. (I came to Stanford for a visit while I was at UCLA, and you told me all about it. I remember very well how your eyes were flashing that day!) How did the scheme evolve? Who lit the first spark? Was it as successful as you had hoped? What are your feelings about how it was received by the fossil dinoflagellate world?

Answer: I think you are right. I can remember no single event that stimulated me more than a talk I heard Max Taylor give in Oslo in 1976. I was there as a visiting scientist at the Norwegian Continental Shelf Institute when Max passed through Oslo on a brief trip to Norway. I had never met him, though his name was familiar to me as one of the many modern biologists involved in one way or another with dinoflagellates. The ideas he presented simply bowled me over. I immediately saw the possibility of their wide application to the morphology of fossil dinos with great potential in respect to the analysis of tabulation patterns. There was also the possibility that what we knew about fossil cysts---with which Max was minimally acquainted---might, in turn, give support to his theory, which was based solely on the study of living forms.

I remember that the following day Barrie Dale (who was already at the University of Oslo, continuing the work on living dinoflagellates he had started at Woods Hole with Dave Wall) and I spent exciting hours talking about the possibilities. When I returned to Stanford I tried to systematically explore these ideas. By the beginning of the new year I was deeply involved. Dave Goodman and Jeff Stein were my graduate students at that time and Svein Manum, from the University of Oslo, had arrived to spend a sabbatical with me at Stanford. So that winter quarter we had an intense and highly stimulating seminar on the subject. From these efforts developed the "Evitt-side" of what has been referred to as the Taylor-Evitt Classification.

QUESTION 51. How did the idea for a Penrose Conference (1978) develop? That first conference bringing together international dinoflagellate specialists on both fossil and modern dinoflagellates was a true landmark in the study of these organisms. Before they arrived at the meeting, the two "sides" didn't even "speak the same language", and we spent a good deal of time explaining and defining concepts and terminology.

Answer: The immediate impetus for this was the urging by Graham Williams that Lew Stover and I should spearhead such a gathering of researchers interested in the two aspects of dinoflagellates, modern and fossil. It had become obvious to many of us working on fossil dinoflagellates that palynologists knew far too little about the living organisms represented by our material. We also suspected that specialists in the living group were at least equally uninformed about aspects of the fossils that might affect their own ideas. So, after inviting Karen A. Steidinger (Florida Marine Research Institute) to represent modern dinoflagellates, we sought support from the Geological Society of America for a Penrose Conference (one of a series in honor of R. A. F. Penrose, Jr. a major benefactor of the GSA). Approval soon ensued and the conference was held in Colorado Springs, Colorado, in the spring of 1978. As you say, it was mostly a mutual learning experience, but it was recognized by both "sides" as a desirable and profitable undertaking. It turned out a great success, with the consequence that the Seventh such International Conference on Modern and Fossil Dinoflagellates---familiarly known as the DINO conferences---was held in Nagasaki, Japan, in 2003.

QUESTION 52. I would love to pursue the question of modern studies providing insight into fossil dinoflagellates. You attended most of the subsequent DINO conferences. From your perspective, how well have dino scientists done in their efforts at communication, etc.?

Answer: I think quite well. Naturally the techniques and primary concerns of the two groups differ widely. However, the best measure of the conference results is that there now exists "A Classification of Living and Fossil Dinoflagellates" (Fensome, R.A.; Taylor, F.J.R.; Norris, G.; Sarjeant, W.A.S.; Wharton, D.I; and Williams, G.L., 1993. American Museum of Natural History, Micropaleontology, Special Publication Number 7, p.1-351. ISBN 0160-2071) whose two principal authors are the major contributors to the taxonomy of fossil and living dinoflagellates today. I think such a publication would never have materialized without the stimulation of the DINO conferences. The importance of this work is not so much the classification itself, which is bound to be temporary and changing however "good" it might be at the moment, but the wide realization that this is one group of organisms and any comprehensive classification must have informed input from specialists on both "sides ".

QUESTION 53. Harry and I completed Ken Piel's oral history interview last November. He talked with us about your joint effort on Nannoceratopsis. We'd love to hear your perspective on that research.

Answer: I was astounded when I saw the remarkable SEM photos Ken produced. To me the collaboration that followed was highly stimulating and enjoyable. I think the result is important because it adds to the clearly very complex picture of dinoflagellate morphology and systematic relationships. Essentially, this genus combines features of morphology that occur today only separately in two very distinct, and apparently widely separated major groups of dinos (dinophysids and peridinids). This was a totally unexpected revelation, but there it stands, wonderfully preserved in these specimens and abundantly represented by less fine material from many areas, in the middle of the Mesozoic, with no demonstrable antecedents or descendents. Could it have been ancestral to the two modern groups before a major break in evolutionary lines leading to the present, or a dead-end offshoot of a common ancestral stock, or what?

QUESTION 54. That brings up the question of the completeness of the dinoflagellate fossil record and the role that it might play in working out the evolution of these forms. Would you give us some of your thoughts on this subject?

Answer: That, of course, involves a great deal of speculation, but there are a few notable features of the record as we know it so far that are very interesting. However, to say more requires some background, but you asked for it, so here goes---

The dinoflagellate fossil record extends primarily from the Triassic onward. In sediments from that span of time their remains are often abundant and occur in many areas. Their utility for dating and environmental interpretation derives from the rapid changes in their morphologic traits through time and their clear associations with particular environmental conditions. With respect to their evolution, however, we have more questions than answers, and some very puzzling observations.

For example, dinoflagellates are judged by biologists to be relatively "primitive" organisms. So, why did they not show up until the Mesozoic as fossils with recognizable similarities to much younger examples? Did they not make preservable cysts before that? Did they earlier have a grossly different morphology, like some of the acritarchs, for example? Did earlier ones represent very different evolutionary lines? Perhaps, but we have no evidence---except, possibly, for the one tantalizingly isolated and controversial example (the form called Arpylorus) in the subsurface Silurian of North Africa. One day someone will find more and better specimens of this curiosity and we will know a little more .

Then there are the cases of two prominent groups of fossil dinoflagellates seemingly very closely similar to species in two major modern groups (Ceratium and its relatives, to which I have already referred, and a large complex of taxa of which living Gymnodinium is an example). In one of these (Ceratium, etc.) there are many species in both fresh and marine water all over the world. In the distinctive shapes of their thecae and in their much less well-known cysts they are exceedingly similar to fossils from the Early Cretaceous and a few "stragglers" in the Late Cretaceous. But there are no traces of anything similar between the Cretaceous and today. In the second example (Gymnodinium, etc.) we have very common and widespread modern forms that are unlike anything in the fossil record except for a single genus with many species, essentially confined to the Late Cretaceous, without any even vaguely similar forms in the Tertiary.

Finally, two important facts. First, most dinoflagellates today do not produce resistant organic-walled cysts (except for some of the forms with siliceous thecae, which stand quite apart from the organisms known to most palynologists). Also, most of the great variety of morphotypes known from Mesozoic and Tertiary fossil cysts have no known counterparts today.

Of course, groups of organisms evolve, often with great changes in morphology; this must be taken into account in any comparison of fossil and modern representatives. However, these examples imply to me that the ability of dinoflagellates to use resistant organic material in the formation of their exterior coverings---and thereby leaving traces of their presence accessible to the palynologist---was a facility that was used, discarded, and reused from time to time throughout the very long geologic history suggested by their biological affinities. I cannot otherwise satisfactorily explain the kind of "spotty" record that stands in major contrast with that of most other common groups of fossils.

QUESTION 55. You had some distinguished graduate students at Stanford, based on their substantive dissertations on dinocysts. And how about the group of students who were in the lab toward the end of your career? It seems to me that you were able to be newly creative in those years, in part because of their presence.

Answer: You are very correct. That last group of students was a remarkable one. I had never before had so many working with me at one time. They were very able, we were mutually very amicable, and we all found the interchange among us exciting and stimulating. The students shared one large office which was often the site for animated discussions on all sorts of dinoflagellate-related topics. Furthermore, I don't think any of us took ourselves so seriously as to prevent our thoroughly enjoying our association. The group consisted of Nairn Albert, Tony Bint, Javier Helenes, John Kokinos, Joyce Lucas-Clark, and David Wharton. My palynological students in earlier years had been John Warren, Don Ester, Carol Chmura, Dewey McLean, Dave Goodman, Jeff Stein, and Sarah Pierce Damassa. All together this seems a small number for 25 years but they certainly made up in quality for any lack of quantity.

QUESTION 56. In 1985, you completed your book on dinoflagellate cysts, which essentially summarizes the observations of some twenty-five years of research. How/when did you determine to write the book, how did you proceed?

Answer: My decision to write came to a head in 1978 and the writing proceeded at an excruciatingly slow pace! I acted on the growing feeling that I had something to offer that needed saying. Foolishly, I thought I could write it during one summer and following sabbatical quarter. I am normally a slow writer and laborious reviser. In addition progress in the field of dinos did not stop with my decision to put pen to paper---the longer the project dragged on, the more revisions were necessary. A major one was an extensive re-write because of my growing conviction that Max Taylor's ideas about tabulation patterns offered much that would improve the interpretation of fossil forms. The significant point was that his notions were essentially unknown to paleontologists and likely to remain so because they would surely be published only in biological journals. But, eventually, the job was done---and none too soon in the interest of domestic tranquility!

QUESTION 57. Through the years you received several awards in recognition of your work on dinoflagellates. Tell us about them.

Answer: In 1983, I received the AASP's first Award for Scientific Excellence, its highest honor. This came as a total surprise and was most gratefully received. At that point I was still years from retirement and this was, understandably, a big boost to my feeling of accomplishment, as well as an encouragement for the future. Then, in 1989, after I had retired, I was elected to honorary membership in the Association which assured my indefinite association with the organization that had been such an important source of contact and support through the years. A third event of recognition and one very special to me because it somehow brings to me a very warm and personal expression of friendship is the honorary membership in the Palaeobotanical and Palynological Society of Utrecht (PPGU) that I was awarded at the DINO 6 Conference in Trondheim, Norway. I am very pleased to have been the first non-Dutchman to be accorded honorary membership in this organization. In addition to these formal awards I take the long flow of applicants to attend my dino short courses, which were at times "booked" for three sessions in advance, as a very genuine indication of appreciation for my work among the many government, industrial and academic institutions these participants represented.

QUESTION 58. In retrospect from this distance, and the book aside, what do you think were your most important publications on dinoflagellates?

Answer: That is one of the easier questions for me to answer. To me there were three that stand out well above the rest as the most substantive contributions. Then there is a fourth, which, if importance is measured in "wallop" per printed word, certainly exceeds all the rest. The first three I have in mind are:

1961 - Observations on the morphology of fossil dinoflagellates

1967 - Dinoflagellate Studies [Part] 2 - The archeopyle

1998 - A tiger by the tail; the exophragm of the Cretaceous-Paleocene dinoflagellate Palaeoperidinium and its implications (with Sarah Pierce Damassa and Nairn Albert)

The fourth was based on a sample of shoreline Pacific plankton. It proved that a typical Hystrichosphaera (i.e., organic-walled cyst, of a sort theretofore unrecognized by students of modern dinoflagellates) forms inside the typical cellulosic motile theca of Gonyaulax, thus confirming the fundamental cyst-theca relationship that I had hypothesized in my 1961 paper (on the basis of fossil morphology and comparison with thecal patterns in modern species):

1964 - Dinoflagellate studies I. Dinoflagellate cysts and thecae: Stanford Univ. Publ., Geol. Sci., v. 10, no.1 (with Susan. E. Davidson)

Answer: There are certainly some big remaining questions. As I've indicated during this discussion there are many uncertainties about the identity and relationship of particular groups. The amassing of more information from more well-preserved material is the obvious path toward resolving these. This will teach us much about assemblages, geologic ranges, and ecological relationships. But we must have the patient specialists who can take the time and effort to study individual fossils exhaustively in order to make the most of the significant morphological features that will lead us to more answers than additional questions.

I think a very great challenge that promises ultimate benefits for the study of both living and fossil dinos is one that must be recognized and met by the biologists. That is the use of DNA to explore the genetic affinities of dinoflagellates. Hopefully this will resolve some of the many questions about interrelationships that are clouded today by confusing and misleading similarities in morphology and apparent stratigraphic ranges, as well as differences in subjective opinions and rank speculations.

QUESTION 60. Do you have any other reflections about palynology, past, present or future, that you would like to share with your colleagues?

Answer: Long experience has taught us that the swing of the pendulum of interest in particular scientific disciplines has a pretty large amplitude. Stimulated to a major degree by interest and demands of the petroleum industry, palynology as applied to fossils experienced a fantastic 30-year period of growth beginning in the mid-1950s. Now, economic demands and changes in industrial emphasis have transformed that period of rich support to one of severe "drought". That has been very hard on many individuals---and has abruptly cut off scientific advances that might otherwise have accrued. I was personally lucky to "catch the crest of the wave" and to leave the scene before it "the wave crashed into shore". The big question is if and when another surge of money and energy will flow into the field?

Thinking about dinoflagellates in particular---but this also applies elsewhere in palynology, too---we have ended a very expansive period of discovery and entered a stage of gradual growth and consolidation. Take the evidence of my card file of species. In 1956 a couple of file drawers could hold all the descriptions and illustrations of fossil dinoflagellates that had ever been published. Now the quantity is measured by the CD diskful. We can't expect the individual investigator to be able to make---with really very little personal effort---such exciting observations and discoveries as I was able to make. To be sure, there will be some, but they will come slowly and with wide separations between them. On the other hand, the fusion of information on fossil and living dinoflagellates has just begun and we can surely expect, sooner or later, to have great progress in our collective understanding of this fascinating group of organisms.

QUESTION 61. Bill, when you retired fully from teaching in 1988 you elected not to continue with the research that had received so much of your attention through the years. What was behind that decision?

Answer: There were several contributing factors. For one, as I have already remarked, much of my work after 1961 was a matter of filling in the details of a new theory. There were many challenges along the way and it was fascinating work---but worth continuing in that fashion to the "end"? If I had continued, the most enticing problem I foresaw would have been to wrestle further with that "tiger" we had just grabbed by the tail, Palaeoperidinium pyrophorum. For another, I had just retired and moved my office at the university into other, but very suitable quarters (although without processing facilities) where I expected to stay, when the Loma Prieta earthquake (1989)forced evacuation of the entire geology building. I would have had to move into other quarters for some sort of a "temporary" existence at a different campus location. That made me rethink the possibilities. But most important of all, through the years I had developed many peripheral interests of a non-geological nature that I never had time to explore. I loved to putter in my wood shop, where I made various utilitarian things for the house. Years before Gisela had become interested in handweaving and handspinning and I had time only to learn the basics of both and to become engrossed in textiles in general. We both enjoy reading and music and we wanted to be able to do more together. I also became acquainted with the computer, especially the graphic possibilities of the Macintosh and these fascinated me. I wrote weaving programs relative to handweaving and became much involved in programming to produce various sorts of geometric designs. So, to put it concisely, I didn't retire FROM teaching and research, I retired TO a variety of these other pursuits---and I haven't regretted the decision for one moment. Even the loss of contact with all but a few of the many very good friends I made among students and professional colleagues has been partly compensated by new acquaintances and experiences in the field of the textile arts. So I have been very busy and very happy---and very fortunate to have enjoyed good health for approaching 20 years of retirement.

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To end this discussion, I'd like to say that this has been a most enjoyable experience. Thanks, Sarah and Harry, for preparing such a carefully thought out set of questions and to agreeing to experiment with this somewhat different format for taking the oral histories. In addition to being a wonderful "reunion" for the four of us, Gisela included, I have thoroughly enjoyed thinking back over the years of my experience in paleontology and sharing some thoughts about it with you.

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Refernences cited that are not included in The Lentin and Williams index of fossil dinoflagellates (1998 edition)

Hoffmeister, William .S., Staplin, Frank L., and Malloy, Raymond E., 1955, Mississippian Plant Spores from the Hardinsburg Formation of Illinois and Kentucky. Journal of Paleontology, v. 29,

Pettijohn, Francis J., 1988, A Century of Geology, 1885-1985, at Johns Hopkins University. Baltimore: Gateway Press, 1988.