This is a huge honor, and I am immensely grateful to the Society, its officers, and the nominating committee. Many thanks also to my colleague and friend Derek Briggs for his kind words. I am especially honored as a foreigner who can claim in no way to be an American or U.S. citizen.
Inevitably, though, I have probably spent several years in North America through my career, and my first visit, for three months, was in 1977, when I was an undergraduate. I studied a degree in Zoology at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, my hometown. I started at university intending to study geology and was adopted by Dr Nigel Trewin (1944–2017) there, my first great mentor. He nurtured my early rather diffuse interest in paleontology and asked me to check over the fossil collections, which he suspected contained some unknown treasures. And indeed, they did.
Henry Alleyne Nicholson (1844–1899) was Professor of Geology at the University of Aberdeen from 1882 to 1899, and it turns out he had brought his entire collections there, spanning early Paleozoic invertebrate fossils—corals, stromatoporoids, brachiopods, graptolites, and even trace fossils from the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, where he had worked. It seems that at some point, possibly in the 1930s, these collections of hundreds of type and figured specimens were incorporated into the teaching collections. To tidy them up, the old handwritten labels were removed and new typed labels inserted. All the pesky stuff about “holotype” and “paratype” and “plate 3, figure 6a” was removed so the students wouldn’t be bothered by such distracting information. So I spent many happy hours, as a geology undergraduate, going through the drawers and comparing the specimens with photocopies of Nicholson’s 150 paleontological papers. We identified 60 type specimens and 450 figured specimens.
Trewin sanctioned the immediate removal of these historically important specimens from the teaching collections and suggested we produce a catalog, which we did, and it was published as the first volume of a journal he established for the purpose, entitled Publications of the Department of Geology and Mineralogy, University of Aberdeen.
Following from this, we identified some Silurian trace fossils from the Nereites Ichnofacies of the Southern Uplands of Scotland, also part of the Nicholson collection and subject of an unpublished 1872 manuscript by Nicholson. We did fieldwork, relocated where he had found the specimens, published his paper with comments, and wrote several papers on these Scottish and comparator trace fossils from the Silurian of other parts of the world, showing how a variety of differently named trace fossils were all parts of the rather complex Dictyodora. This complex trace fossil consists of a basal burrow bearing scratch marks, and a remarkable vertical structure, cut through the sediment, possibly formed by a vertical respiratory tube. I am forever grateful to Nigel Trewin for teaching me how to construct a scientific paper and the importance of effective graphics to explain complex themes.
I must have spent too much time engrossed in these ancient specimens, and at the end of my second undergraduate year was invited to switch degrees from a major in geology to zoology; I just couldn’t get excited by geochemical phase diagrams.
I had also become interested in the Triassic and the origin of dinosaurs, partly because of the existence of a fauna of Carnian-aged fossil reptiles from Elgin, close to Aberdeen. I had played around with some counts of faunal compositions and wrote a very primitive paper about the paleoecology and relative ages of Triassic tetrapod faunas; and I went to the 1976 meeting on Vertebrate Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy, held that year in London. Most of the professors glowered at me as an annoying young person, but I gave my talk and spoke to some people, including an American attendee and anglophile, Professor J. Alan Holman (1931–2006) of Michigan State University.
Al Holman was an enthusiast for Cenozoic herptiles, field working in Nebraska, and writing numerous papers about new taxa, and eventually the synoptic volumes about Cenozoic snakes, lizards, and turtles. He invited me to visit East Lansing for three months in the summer of 1977 and employed me as his assistant in the museum. We spent a month in the field, excavating bone-bearing sediments in the Valentine Formation, sieving and picking bones. Back in the MSU Museum, I was given charge of the maceration room, which was in the basement and opened only to the outside. Al Holman had thrown a lot of carcasses of modern fishes, amphibians, and reptiles in there before we went in the field, and my job was to fight through the stench and the dermestid beetles to extract and box up the skeletons, which Al used for comparative purposes.
I was hooked on fieldwork, sieving, small fossils, museum work … and I am endlessly grateful to J. Alan Holman for giving me my first employment in paleontology.
Still, Miocene snake vertebrae and lizard jaws weren’t dinosaurs, so I wrote to a young Phil Currie, just starting his job at the University of Edmonton, and he, amazingly, invited me to be his field assistant in summer 1978 and 1979, excavating dinosaurs from the Dinosaur Park Formation on the banks of the Peace River in southern Alberta, now part of the hunting ground of the Royal Tyrrell Museum, which did not exist at that time. There I learned how to trench around, plaster, and extract dinosaur bones safely. I also learned that Alberta then did not permit drinking on Sundays, so we would flee across the nearby provincial border into Saskatchewan. All we could get was Coors Light, so I’m not sure it was such a big win. I owe my introduction to the dinosaur world to Phil Currie, and it’s great to continue to meet him at conferences.
After all these shenanigans as an undergraduate, I did graduate and evidently well enough to secure grant funding for my dream Ph.D. topic at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. There I was taken under the wing of Alick Walker (1925–1999), doyen of Triassic archosaurs, to study the Elgin rhynchosaur Hyperodapedon. Alick had developed a unique way to extract information about these amazing fossils, namely by making PVC casts. He introduced me to the hidden mysteries. The Elgin fossils were all preserved in fine, yellow-colored sandstone, and the actual fossil material had rotted away leaving exquisite molds in the rocks. In Victorian days, paleontologists had taken surface casts in plaster or early forms of rubber, but these could not penetrate the deep recesses. Alick had realized, when he did his Ph.D. in the 1950s, that PVC was the best bet—it is the material of rubber gloves, capable of being drawn out into thin sheets with great strength.
I clamped several rocks together, inside which were the molds representing a complete rhynchosaur skull, sealed all the holes but the topmost one, mixed the PVC solution, and added brown coloring to produce a matt finish. I poured the solution into the top hole, bashing the rocks continuously to make bubbles rise, and then put the whole thing into the oven where it was baked at 160°C for two days. After it had cooled, I enlisted the help of fellow students to lever the rocks apart and pull the cast out. The whole skull was particularly recalcitrant, and it took five of us a day to get the whole thing out—but the PVC did not break. One of those five fellow Ph.D. students, Mary Monro, later became my wife. She had had full notice of what I was like. So Alick Walker was my fourth teacher and mentor.
After that, I worked for a year for a UK government department, the Nature Conservancy Council, with the fantastic job of traveling all over Britain, visiting all the fossil reptile sites ever identified, from Lyme Regis (and Mary Anning) in the south to Elgin in the north, determining the top 50 sites for conservation, all still protected from damage and degradation. Then I moved to a postdoc at Oxford, where I worked with Tom Kemp and learned about cladistics and museums, and much more besides. My first job was as a lecturer at the Queen’s University of Belfast in Northern Ireland, where Mary and I worked for five years before moving to the University of Bristol in 1989, where we have been ever since.
I’ve always enjoyed subsequent working visits to the United States, including a stay at University of Chicago when David Raup and Jack Sepkoski looked after me, and a three-month sabbatical at Yale in 2009, when we were working on melanosomes and color determination in bird and dinosaur feathers.
Professors of course “profess” their subjects, and I have always loved teaching, whether undergraduates or graduates. We’ve been delighted with the success of the taught Masters in Palaeobiology at Bristol, which regularly recruits 25–30 students from all over the world, who come expecting dinosaurs and leave with their heads full of phylogenetics, macroevolution, taphonomy, and 3D scan segmentation. I’ve also enjoyed writing books over the years, some about dinosaurs, some for kids, but some also about basic paleontology, extinctions, and other themes (Fig. 1). We have such a rich discipline—how it has really progressed in the past 30 or 40 years!
Michael Benton talking at a book launch at the Hay-on-Wye Book Festival in 2019. Credit © Hay Festival Global.
Since the 1980s and 1990s, we have so many amazing new fossils, new imaging techniques, and new computational methods. With CT scanning and enhanced microscopy we can see and map the surface chemistry of fossils in unimaginable ways. And computational methods in phylogenetics, macroevolution, palaeoecology, and biomechanics have become widely available and relatively easy to use, allowing everyone to apply sophisticated methods in their research. We can tell the speeds, bite forces, and even colours of dinosaurs (and other fossils) and hydrodynamics of aquatic organisms – and all without a time machine. This is not guesswork; it’s refutable science. What a change in our field and how wonderful that we can share our data across interdisciplinary boundaries with cognate experts in phylogenomics, functional biology, ecology, climate change, and conservation biology.
You’ve been attentive far too long, so I end with sincere thanks and gratitude to all my friends and colleagues across North America.
