Stephanie E. Pierce doesn’t like to call herself a “paleontologist,” which might come as a surprise for the curator of vertebrate paleontology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). She prefers to be known as a paleobiologist, a comparative anatomist, and, before any of that, a youth gymnastics champion.
“You get this picture of a paleontologist, when you say that word, as a guy in a cowboy hat in the middle of a dusty field,” she says, “and that’s the farthest from the truth—especially when it comes to me.”
Pierce, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, runs a lab, teaches, conducts fieldwork, and oversees the MCZ’s collection of roughly 90,000 vertebrate specimens. While most paleontologists work as museum curators or academic researchers, Pierce says Harvard lets her live the “paleontologist’s dream” of doing both.
Her introduction to the field, like her research today, was driven by curiosity. Growing up in Alberta, Canada, surrounded by dinosaur fossils, she was always fascinated by evolution.
And her research, especially studying how fish evolved to walk, made her appreciate how amazing gymnasts are. Pierce, a junior championship vaulter in Canada, said that a gymnast flipping through the air shares the same basic structure as the ancient fish, evolved and specialized over time.
“It’s just unbelievable what a standard vertebrate body plan that’s shaped over hundreds of millions of years has led to,” she says.
