PRESENTATION OF THE PALEONTOLOGICAL SOCIETY MEDAL TO ANDREW H. KNOLL

Abstract

Ladies and Gentlemen, as everyone in this room knows, Andy Knoll has been an innovative and dedicated contributor to paleontology since his days as a graduate student with Elso Barghorn at Harvard. Andy began his research career as a paleobotanist with particular interest in the Proterozoic, but his bent has always been toward examining the evolutionary history of plants in their geological context. He has been an indefatigable field worker, with expeditions to Svalbard, Australia, Greenland, Siberia, Namibia, and a host of other regions to his credit. And I do mean expeditions. John Grotzinger of Cal Tech likes to tell a story about going down a river in northern Siberia. John went ahead with a video camera and filmed Andy coming through a rapid. A bit bedraggled after a few weeks in the bush, Andy evidently looked at the camera and intoned: “I am going theoretical.” But I do note that Andy's more recent field work does seem suspiciously clustered around such well-known wine-producing regions as South Africa, Australia, and Spain. Such field work has always been critical to Andy's contributions as a scientist. His insights into the interrelationships between environmental change and the history of life have been profound, ranging from the vicissitudes of Proterozoic acritarchs and the role of oxygen in the early divergence of Metazoa to entirely novel suggestions of how patterns of selective extinction among marine invertebrates at …