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Falmouth Forum Series 2009-2010
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Photo by Dan Dry for the University of Chicago
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"Finding Your Inner Fish"
October 9, 2009 - Lillie Auditorium, 7:30 PM
Lectures are free and open to the public.
Neil Shubin, Associate Dean and the Robert R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago
Read the press release
Lecture Abstract
In 2004, renowned University of Chicago paleontologist and author Neil Shubin and his colleagues discovered a 375-million-year-old fossil fish in the Canadian Arctic whose flat skull and limbs, and finger, toe, ankle and wrist bones, provide a link between fish and the earliest land-dwelling creatures. In this Falmouth Forum lecture, Dr. Shubin will talk about discovery: How do we find fossils, and how do we know where to look? Some of the most important discoveries come when we link these fossils to new data from genetics and developmental biology and find the deep connections that we have to the rest of life on our planet. When we look at the world in this way, even an ancient fossil fish tells us something about ourselves.
Neil H. Shubin is Associate Dean of and the Robert R. Bensley Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago and Provost at the Field Museum. Educated at Columbia and Harvard, he has found new fossils that change the way we think about many of the key transitions in evolution: from the reptile-mammal transition, the water-land transformation, and the origin of frogs, salamanders, turtles, and flying reptiles. These discoveries have emerged from his expeditions to Greenland, the High Arctic of Canada, Argentina, China, Morocco, Nova Scotia, and the deserts of the U.S. In 2006, Dr. Shubin announced in the journal Nature the startling discovery of Tiktaalik, “a mosaic of primitive fish and derived amphibian.” Author of numerous scientific papers, including over 20 in the prestigious journals Science and Nature, he has received numerous fellowships and awards including a Miller Research Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, The Berlin Prize and ABC News Person of the Week, Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Dr. Shubin’s book, Your Inner Fish: A Journey Through the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (Pantheon Press), was published in 2008.
Admission to this Falmouth Forum presentation is free and open to the public. A buffet dinner is available before the lecture at 6:00 p.m. in the Swope Center located near the auditorium. Dinner tickets are $25 and must be purchased in advance at either Eight Cousins Children’s Books, Main Street, Falmouth, or at the MBL’s Communications Office in the Candle House in Woods Hole. Dinner seats are limited and tickets are only available until they sell out or until 5:00 on the Tuesday before the lecture. For more information, contact the MBL Communications Office at: (508) 289-7423 or
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