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As a curator in herpetology, I have kind of joint responsibility for
being a gatekeeper
of
specimens
to be loaned to other researchers, we've got a very large collection of amphibians and
reptiles.
My
area of interest
historically has been kind of philosophy of science and
working out phylogenys of
various groups of lizards and more recently amphibians.
I don't remember
a time when I wasn't drawn to it.
When I was maybe four,
my parents were driving out to Yuma from the Phoenix area. They stopped at
this place called date land,
a little park, and there was little rattlesnake coiled up
against a tree and I thought this was so cool
so I told my mother and I'll never forget, she said Oh David, better go
take a look, I'm sure its some worm or something
and it was a this raddle snake, and of course he took a tire iron and dispatched it
pretty quickly
and I was sad that I'd said anything. From then on I was just interested in animals
and my parents got me you know the little turtles and stuff like that. For
my dissertation I worked on a group of South American lizards,
but more importantly for
the rest of the world we worked on all Iguania which is
a collection of about a thousand species. What it ended up doing was making
this area popular for other people, that's frequently what happens when
you do something large it actually focuses the questions of other people
and all of a sudden it just gets really crowded, so that's a fairly crowded area
of research now. Systematics field work is quite different from say
ecological field work where you set up
areas, and you go back to them over and over and over again.
I grew up near the Mexican boundary so
crossing over, I spent a lot of time in Mexico that's been a long
time ago now. It still has so many species that are unnamed
that it's fairly interesting. People say was it really necessary to
put honest to god specimens in a jar and keep them
forever? And the answer is
yeah. We don't actually know what the questions are that we want to ask.
When you're doing general survey work
your first question is, what's here?
But there are all sorts of sophisticated questions that could be asked of specimens
later.
Everyone here enjoys being able to follow their own curiosity
'cause that's really what being a scientist is, it's not
that you know you wake up one day and and feel
disposed to wear a white lab coat,
it's that you get really curious about well how does this work?
That's the best thing
is that you're actually paid
to be curious about things and go out and to try to find the answers