Associate Professor Jonathan Geisler, Ph.D., uses a rock pick to unearth fossils in China.

Finding striking differences among species’ fossil remains gives observers a better appreciation for variation. But discovering similarities is more enlightening.  

“I’m searching to show the similarities, to make them obvious to people,” Solounias says, grabbing a cut giraffe bone from his office and showing where the giraffe’s “big toe” is merged into the bone at a point about three feet off the ground.  

“It’s like two cars—a Honda and a Volvo,” he says, describing how humans and giraffes are more closely related than one might think. “We’re probably even more similar than that.”

Or put another way: there are fish swimming around today that are more closely related to us than other fish. Take the lungfish, says Bever, with which we share a small number of derived features, the most obvious being lungs.

Striking differences—be they scales, shells, fins, or feathers—are obvious but may not be revealing.

“They don’t demonstrate as much about evolution,” says Hill. “The similarities are where the surprises come in. 
Subtle variations on a theme can actually be the most stunning examples of vertebrate evolution.”

The independent acquisition of similar adaptations, known as convergent evolution, is another area of interest for NYIT’s anatomy experts.

“For reasons we don’t completely understand, the same solutions to the same problems have evolved over and over again,” says Mihlbachler. “One of my burning questions is: why is that?”

Perhaps that is where the paleontologists at NYIT have an evolved sense of patience.

“Sometimes you don’t get an answer to your question,” says Mihlbachler. “Sometimes you just find a better question.”

The answer may come through hunting and holding fossils from ancient times. After many years of study, in some cases borne of an inquisitive child’s fascination with creatures from the past, the paleontologists agree that cradling a 30-million-year-old fossil is exhilarating and humbling.

“You have to remind yourself of it,” Bever says. “You sometimes lose that sense of wonder about it, that it’s been around here since then. It’s a pretty awe-inspiring thought. But if you thought about it too often, you’d just wax poetic all day long instead of writing scientific papers.”

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