Ladies and gentlemen, friends and colleagues, the winner of the 2010 Charles Schuchert Award is Professor Philip Donoghue of the University of Bristol. In the natural progression of our personal lives, the transition from young snot to old fart is so gradual that one tends not to recognize it, least of all in oneself. Most of us—those further along in their careers— have passed through the stage of young, promising paleontologist to become middle-aged promising paleontologists. Not so Phil Donoghue. I first met him when he was a graduate student at the University of Leicester. We got into a discussion about the nature of conodonts and certain pet ideas of mine that I had published. Phil did not agree with me so he went down in my book as a young snot. Soon thereafter, he published a ground-breaking, paradigm-changing paper, together with Peter Forey and Dick Aldridge, on the phylogenetic position of conodonts. Now, I realized that it was I who was the old fart. Phil had demonstrated that he had skipped the young-and-promising stage. He was, and is, young and delivering. Most people who start working on conodonts tend to remain with them. There is something about that mouth apparatus and the way in which it grabs hold of you. But Phil quickly tore himself loose from its grip. He quickly demonstrated an unquenchable zeal in attacking central issues in evolutionary paleontology, such as the origin of microstructures in teeth, the origin of teeth in jaws, the origin of jaws in vertebrates, the origin of vertebrates among animals, the origin of animals in the biosphere, and so on. I fear he will not stop until he has solved the question of the origin of life, the universe, and everything else. The breadth of questions he has already addressed …