SEX IN STONE: Researchers debate whether the face-to-face mating position was natural in these copulating froghoppers or was an artifact of their preservation.S. LI ET AL., PLOS ONE, 8:E78188, 2013.Chungkun Shih had no intention of becoming a paleontologist, much less one who would devote his avocation to the sex lives of extinct insect species. But while working as a chemical engineer for international petroleum companies in northeastern China in the late 1990s, he was drawn to the open-air fossil markets in the town of Jinzhou. Every Sunday afternoon, on the streets of the bustling industrial city, Shih perused the wares of vendors hawking treasures from geologic eras past—millennia-old fossils of fish, insects, and other animals, which local farmers had unearthed as they plowed the soil.
The Chinese material that’s coming out of there now is absolutely stunning. They’re doing a lot of great work.—Bruce Archibald,
Simon Fraser University
What began as a hobby became Shih’s obsession. The first few fossils he bought from the Jinzhou market were 125-million-year-old fish, some of which he gifted to his fishing buddies back home in New Jersey, where he now resides full-time. But his passion became invertebrate fossils—specifically, insects—which he would purchase and give to researchers at Capital Normal University in Beijing. “I donated my fossils for research, and never ever sold one piece of my fossils to anyone,” Shih recalls.
He cultivated an expert knowledge of the fossils and the insect evolutionary secrets they enshrined, and he built a good working relationship with ...
