Life and Work
Sepkoski was born in Presque Isle, Maine. In 1970, Sepkoski received a B.S. degree, magna cum laude, from the University of Notre Dame. Under Stephen Jay Gould he earned a Ph.D. in geological sciences from Harvard University in 1977. His Ph.D. was on the field geology and paleontology of the Black Hills of South Dakota. From 1974 to 1978, Sepkoski taught at the University of Rochester. In 1978 he joined the University of Chicago and became a professor in 1986. Sepkoski was also a research associate at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He died of heart failure related to high blood pressure at the age of 50.
Sepkoski is perhaps best known for his global compendia of marine animal families and genera, data sets that continue to motivate a tremendous amount of paleobiological research. Sepkoski himself explored his compendium very thoroughly. In 1981, he identified three great Evolutionary Faunas in the marine animal fossil record. Each of his Evolutionary Faunas, the Cambrian, Paleozoic, and Modern Faunas, is composed of Linnean classes of animals that have covarying diversity patterns, characteristic rates of turnover, and broadly similar ecologies. Most importantly, they sequentially replaced one another as dominant groups during the Phanerozoic. Sepkoski modeled the Evolutionary Faunas using three coupled logistic functions, but the underlying drivers of the prominent shift in taxonomic composition represented by the three faunas remains unknown.
Read more about this topic: Jack Sepkoski
Famous quotes containing the words life and, life and/or work:
“The cinema is not an art which films life: the cinema is something between art and life. Unlike painting and literature, the cinema both gives to life and takes from it, and I try to render this concept in my films. Literature and painting both exist as art from the very start; the cinema doesn’t.”
—Jean-Luc Godard (b. 1930)
“This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“Our life of poverty is as necessary as the work itself. Only in heaven will we see how much we owe to the poor for helping us to love God better because of them.”
—Mother Teresa (b. 1910)