Nick Pyenson first fell in love with natural history museums as a child, growing up in Montreal when his parents would take him to McGill University’s Redpath Museum and Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology to learn about the diversity of Earth’s animals, plants, and ecosystems. Seeing the skeletons of large animals, especially those of whales, got him thinking about the stories marine mammals had to tell. In 1998, Pyenson went to Emory University and while he was there started studying whale brains. During a college trip, he and his friends “found a dead dolphin on a beach,” he recalls, “and I thought it was totally fascinating.” The dolphin led Pyenson to question how well the fossil record represents past life. “Understanding pathways of decay and destruction,” he says, “is . . . a big part of what paleobiologists do.”
In 2003, Pyenson, now a paleobiologist and curator of fossil marine ...
