I write today to urge a strengthening of support by Cornell University for the Paleontological Research Institution on Trumansburg Rd. in Ithaca. I have visited and delivered lectures at both institutions many times over the past 60 years. I have long recognized Cornell as the truly great educational and scholarly research institution it has always been. I see the PRI as a vital, thoroughly modern world-class research and educational system that is vital to the preservation and dissemination of knowledge on the history of life. In an age fraught with misinformation, living as we do in a society utterly dependent on the current high state of scientific knowledge and ongoing research, it is vital to our national interests to keep such institutions up and running and fully functional.
So much is well-known. I am further motivated today by the Cornell student, Emily Cavanaugh, who has brought the plight of PRI to the Cornell community at large, as well as to me personally. Emily is the very embodiment of why PRI is so important to Cornell. She first contacted me about some unusually important fossils she discovered, and now studies for an honors thesis. I based the theory of punctuated equilibria (Eldredge and Gould, 1972) mainly on my research on the Middle Devonian trilobite Eldredgeops rana. I have encountered only a very few specimens of these trilobites younger than the ones I collected in South Lansing. All have turned out to be so poorly preserved as to be unidentifiable. Emily Cavanaugh’s Ithaca Shale fossils are in the Upper Devonian. She is on the verge of determining whether her specimens represent the dramatic survival of the last known species, or whether indeed the stock persisted through another evolutionary event, when most of the rest of the fauna became extinct.
We are living in an age when the reality of mass extinctions is becoming personal: we are in the early stages of the Sixth Extinction. The survival of Earth’s living species — including ourselves — is at stake. Emily’s work on what really happened to this lineage of trilobites is vital to understanding the dynamics of the extinction process and the degree to which evolution provides a potential “escape valve” to the future.
In her opinion piece, Emily writes trenchantly and poignantly describing how her passion, motivation and early hands-on training have depended crucially on her PRI experiences — including tutelage by Warren Allmon, Director of PRI, and himself a distinguished paleontologist. Without PRI, ambitious students like Emily would lose an important educational resource.
I urge Cornell to examine the nature of its support for PRI — with the knowledge that its work is more vital than ever for the insights it can give us for the potentially catastrophic ecological future the species of our planet currently face.
With great respect for Cornell’s scientific and educational presence in our country,
Leaderboard 2
– Niles Eldredge
Curator Emeritus
Division of Paleontology
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