A Vietnam Veteran Collected Fossils for 66 Years. One, Mislabeled 'Baby Lamprey,' Made Paleontologists Reconsider How Vertebrates Moved From Water to Land

Eli Stark-Elster | AAAS Mass Media Fellow

Add as preferred source Two fossils of juvenile embolomeres—crocodile-like creatures, illustrated here—suggest that they did not undergo metamorphosis to become adults and that the ancestors of today s birds, mammals, reptiles and amphibians might not have had a tadpole life phase. Berit Goding Richard Rock—a Vietnam War veteran, a Master Gardener and an avid fossil collector—has been picking up rocks for 66 years. His favored site is Mazon Creek, a prolific fossil bed located about 70 miles southwest of Chicago. It’s renowned not only for its fossils but also for the dedicated community of amateur scientists who brave the heat, poison ivy and Lyme-bearing ticks to collect and catalog artifacts from one of the world’s great paleontological reservoirs.

In 2023, fellow fossil enthusiast Andrew Young asked Rock if he could photograph his collections. Rock “had display cases throughout the house and an overloaded storage area in the garage,” Young recalls. “I went into his study, looked at the glass shelves, began to take specimens down, and I saw one that had a small, laminated label that said ‘baby lamprey.’ And I thought to myself, ‘This is not a lamprey.’”