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Geerat Vermeij is probably best known for his work chronicling the arms race among long-extinct molluscs and their predators. By examining and analyzing fossils for evidence of interspecies competition and predation, Vermeij has prompted the field of paleobiology to acknowledge the profound influences creatures have on fashioning each other's evolutionary fates. Vermeij, a native of the Netherlands, has concentrated, especially, on ecological interactions like competition and predation, rather than on environmental factors such as climate change. Vermeij has also made major contributions to research on the movement of species between different marine environments after the removal of barriers, and he has published on such varied topics as bird evolution and leaf shape. Vermeij, an Academy Fellow and a professor of paleoecology at the University of California at Davis. He has published nearly a hundred scientific papers and four books, including Evolution and Escalation: An Ecological History of Life, A Natural History of Shells, and a recent autobiography entitled Privileged Hands: A Scientific Life. He served as editor for Evolution, the field's foremost journal, has a world-class collection of shells, and is an intrepid field naturalist and explorer of the coasts of nearly every continent. In 1992, Vermeij won a MacArthur Fellowship.
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I knew what I wanted to be when I was ten years old. I wanted to be a conchologist, then a biologist, in any case a scientist who does research and who gets to go to all sorts of interesting places. I never wavered from this path. Fortunately, my profession chose to allow me to practice it as professor. What would you recommend for students wanting to pursue a similar career? If students want a research-oriented career in science, they need three interrelated qualities in abundance: a boundless curiosity about the world, a passion for doing the necessary hard work and a willingness to work under adverse circumstances and with little pay. You have to love this kind of work. What do you like best about your profession? I like research and its associated reading and writing best in my profession. The process of discovering new facts, of adding to knowledge, of building a body of theory based on one's own work and the accumulated knowledge of others, is immensely rewarding. I learn every day, and I enjoy communicating what I have learned and what I think I know to others. For me, the preferred medium is the written word. I also enjoy lecturing or leading discussions in my classes. What web sites and references would you recommend for viewers interested in your work that was featured in The Shape of Life series? I would recommend my book, A Natural History of Shells (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993, 207 P.). |
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