What's the use: William King Gregory and the functional morphology of fossil vertebrates

Abstract

In 1918 William King Gregory, professor of vertebrate paleontology at Columbia University, responded to a letter from Samuel Wendell Williston pertaining to the latter's retirement. Williston and Gregory were among the country's leading students of fossil reptiles, and Williston particularly desired Gregory as his successor at the University of Chicago. Gregory, however, noted that his specialized interests made him an inadequate candidate for the position: "The evolution of the locomotor apparatus, of food capturing apparatus, and functional and structural differences among classes, orders, etc," he claimed, "have so preoccupied me that I am largely ignorant of the daily work of paleontologists, the work in stratigraphy, correlation, migration, systematics, and field collecting." 1 Questions of functional morphology indeed dominated Gregory's work, and he turned down Williston's request. More important, a concern with such problems distinguished Gregory's interests from those of many of his colleagues, and led him to develop a dynamic program of research on the functional morphology of fossil vertebrates. On the basis of that research he offered important new interpretations and considerably expanded the domain of questions, methods, and insights within the field of vertebrate paleontology. Traditionally, vertebrate paleontologists had demonstrated little concern with questions of habit, use, or the relationship between form and function. Georges Cuvier, Vladimir Kovalevsky, and Louis Dollo had, of course, examined problems of functional morphology, and many others no doubt considered questions pertaining to the use and adaptation of parts.2 Nevertheless, most