Dave Bottjer did his undergraduate geology major at Bryn Mawr College (1973), and received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1978. Since 1979 he has been at the University of Southern California, where he is now Professor. His interests lie in the realm of Phanerozoic paleoecology and paleobiology, and his current research is aimed at unraveling ecological settings at the beginning of both the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic. Here he is shown on a Lower Cambrian bedding plane which, to the right, has large grooves made by an early metazoan bioturbator, and thus provides a snapshot during the beginning of the agronomic revolution.
