In November 2023, my colleague Sabrina Moore and I joined the museum staff as interns on an Institute of Museum and Library Services-funded grant to work in the Museum’s Department of Vertebrate Paleontology archive. We were tasked with processing a collection of Vertebrate Paleontology Curator Eugene S. Gaffney’s professional papers. This work includes surveying, arranging, and describing the materials consisting of correspondence with fellow scientists, drafts of peer-reviewed papers, countless images of specimens, and other records of his research activities.
Throughout his paleontological career, Gaffney engaged deeply with the fossil record of extinct turtles to excavate new understandings of the development of these reptiles. After studying at Rutgers University and Columbia University, Gaffney joined AMNH as an Associate Curator in the Department of Vertebrate Paleontology in 1970 and would retire in 2011 having spent over three decades as a Curator. His work focused on the use of morphology and systematics to analyze the shared characteristics, unique differences, and development of turtles. This took him to Europe, across the Americas, and Australia including extensive fieldwork on Australia’s Lord Howe Island to study the fossils of the meiolania–a giant turtle with horns and a spiked tail. Gaffney was also one of the main planners of the renovation of the museum’s fossil halls in the 1990s. He published extensively, organized Society of Vertebrate Paleontology conferences as well as symposiums of turtle-specific paleontologists and was a well-respected member of the scientific community.
In addition to all this work, he spent years–as we will see below–answering questions like “did fruit exist in the time of the dinosaurs?”
Coming to this work without any serious scientific background has meant that Sabrina Moore, my fellow volunteer archivist and I have learned so much about the history and physiology of turtles while working on this project. After nearly a year, we can now discuss the two major turtle families (side-necked and retractable necked) and the meiolania and stupendemys found in the museum fossil halls feel like old friends (although the latter is difficult to see and not think of the photo included in Gaffney’s papers of the fossil wearing a Gaffney mask the preparators put on it as a surprise).
We have learned so much from Gaffney, and his papers show that we aren’t the only ones. The collection includes letters written to him by curious, scientifically minded kids from around the country asking him about the life and times of dinosaurs. Questions ranged from “why did the dinosaurs die off” and “what sounds did they make” to whether paleontologists wear special clothes or the question regarding the existence of fruit mentioned above. Some letters make plain the correspondent’s future ambitions such as one who, after casually dropping facts about Pteranodon’s nests, writes “now going down to bisness[sic], would you please let me go behind the scenes” or the writer who implores Gaffney to not “dig up all the fossils…save some for me.” Other correspondents are exceptionally open-hearted such as the one who, after asking for a fossil, shares that “everybody laughs at me because I love dinosaurs but don’t have a real fossil.”
(Want to learn from Gaffney as well? His papers are open to the public and the finding aid can be found here.)
No matter the question, Gaffney responds with an answer that is conversational and cognizant of his audience. But it is also unmistakably a scientific answer, and one provided without a whiff of condescension. (If anyone receives Gaffney’s scorn, it is the adults who write “I found a fossil, how much will you pay for it.”) Gaffney shares his understanding with his correspondents but also makes it clear to them what isn’t known or what is only a guess. In fact, in one letter asking about the possible causes of the dinosaurs’ extinction, Gaffney shares that he doesn’t study this topic very much because he prefers questions that can be answered. He is also unfailingly supportive, offering tours if someone is in or will be visiting New York, providing his phone number, and even supplying the contact information for relevant colleagues for those traveling to different parts of the country. Encouragement to write again is a common feature of Gaffney’s responses.
We can see here Gaffney the scientist and Gaffney the teacher–he, like many of his AMNH colleagues, taught at Columbia University for many years. We can also see, perhaps, echoes of Gaffney as a young man trying to find his own way into the field. He was mentored at a young age by the prestigious paleontologists Donald Baird of Princeton University and Rainer Zangerl of the Field Museum and these contacts helped shape his scientific approaches and focus of study. In fact, included in Gaffney’s papers is a letter he received when he was 15 from AMNH paleontologist Edwin Colbert responding to questions Gaffney had about tritylodonts after visiting the museum. Years later, Gaffney would not only have Colbert’s job but also conduct fieldwork at the very dig site where the tritylodonts were found.
It is not too much of a stretch to imagine that Gaffney saw himself in his kid correspondents and to see the time, thought, and support he put into his responses as paving the way for the person who would in turn take his position at the museum. As Gaffney wrote to the writer who asked him not to dig up all the fossils: “there are plenty of fossils left in the ground…so don’t worry about all of them being collected.”
And with that, I’ll end this post by saying, as one child does at the end of their letter, “thank you, Mr. Scientist” for your kindness and for your life’s work to help clarify our understanding of the deep mysteries of the world around us.
