David L. Fox
Department of Geology and Geophysics
University of Minnesota
310 Pillsbury Drive SE
Minneapolis, MN, 55455-0219
USA
Although officially born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, my
family and I moved to Birmingham, Alabama when I was three weeks old. Like
several other PE staff members, I am a southerner. However, after years of book
learning at fancy pants schools and good clean living just about everywhere but
in the South, among the few vestiges of my down home origins are a predilection
for the use of “y’all” in formal communications and a fondness for bass fishing.
Four years after my triumphant return to the town of my birth, I received an A.B.
in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University with an emphasis in hominid
paleontology. I then moved to the upper left corner of the country and worked
for a time as a wooden stair maker’s apprentice in Seattle, Washington. Save for
some of the usual twists and turns life presents us, I would probably still be
there making turning wooden staircases. Instead, having decided I was interested
in a field with more fossils than workers, I moved to the Midwest for graduate
studies in vertebrate paleontology in the Department of Geological Sciences and
Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan. Under the guidance of Dan
Fisher and Catherine Badgley, I developed a range of research interests in
graduate school that I continue to pursue today. These include the evolution and
ecology of elephants from the point of view of their tusks, applications of
stable isotopes in paleoecology, ecological changes and extinctions among late
Cenozoic mammals in North America, the ecological structure of the modern mammal
fauna of North America, and stratocladistics. After finishing my Ph.D. in 1999,
I moved out to the left coast for a postdoc with my academic brother Paul Koch
at the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Two years of mountains and ocean, California rolls and surfers, temperatures
that never get below 50° F and the risk of sinking into the sea were enough for
me, so in 2001 I had to move back to the middle of the country. I am now an
Associate Professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and continue research in stable isotope
paleocology, mammalian paleoecology and biogeography, and stratocladistics.
Although officially born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, my
family and I moved to Birmingham, Alabama when I was three weeks old. Like
several other PE staff members, I am a southerner. However, after years of book
learning at fancy pants schools and good clean living just about everywhere but
in the South, among the few vestiges of my down home origins are a predilection
for the use of “y’all” in formal communications and a fondness for bass fishing.
Four years after my triumphant return to the town of my birth, I received an A.B.
in Biological Anthropology from Harvard University with an emphasis in hominid
paleontology. I then moved to the upper left corner of the country and worked
for a time as a wooden stair maker’s apprentice in Seattle, Washington. Save for
some of the usual twists and turns life presents us, I would probably still be
there making turning wooden staircases. Instead, having decided I was interested
in a field with more fossils than workers, I moved to the Midwest for graduate
studies in vertebrate paleontology in the Department of Geological Sciences and
Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan. Under the guidance of Dan
Fisher and Catherine Badgley, I developed a range of research interests in
graduate school that I continue to pursue today. These include the evolution and
ecology of elephants from the point of view of their tusks, applications of
stable isotopes in paleoecology, ecological changes and extinctions among late
Cenozoic mammals in North America, the ecological structure of the modern mammal
fauna of North America, and stratocladistics. After finishing my Ph.D. in 1999,
I moved out to the left coast for a postdoc with my academic brother Paul Koch
at the Department of Earth Sciences at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Two years of mountains and ocean, California rolls and surfers, temperatures
that never get below 50° F and the risk of sinking into the sea were enough for
me, so in 2001 I had to move back to the middle of the country. I am now an
Associate Professor in the Department of Geology and Geophysics at the
University of Minnesota in Minneapolis and continue research in stable isotope
paleocology, mammalian paleoecology and biogeography, and stratocladistics.