With international colleagues, and his students, University of Otago geology Prof Ewan Fordyce (67) has spent decades trying to unravel the complex history of marine, backboned animals.
He has retired from teaching at the university and is now working the final months of a three-year Marsden Grant to investigate field sites for whales and dolphins from 18 million to 20 million years ago.
Prof Fordyce said his childhood was one of a broad-ranging natural historian who lacked significant direction.
But he soon became passionate about the overlap between zoology and palaeontology.
Critically, at the start of his career, in the late 1970s he spent 18 months as a postdoctoral researcher at the distinguished Smithsonian Institution, in Washington DC.
He then spent time at the Earth Sciences Monash University, in Melbourne.
He entered academic life at the University of Otago with an international perspective about 40 years ago.
And he turned his world-class studies to observations in his own backyard.
"I think the big issue for me has been work in the Waitaki region: Oamaru, South Canterbury," Prof Fordyce said. "It has yielded fossils that are pretty important on a world scale.
"I’m always interested in the oddities, in things that are a bit different, because they can always tell us about ancient environments and ancient ecosystems."
Prof Fordyce said one of his proudest accomplishments was learning to speak about his scientific interests with everyday members of the public.
That work is reflected in the Waitaki’s Vanished World Trail.
Vanished World ranges from Waianakarua to Oamaru and inland to Duntroon.
It features the ancient history of the region: fossil sites, extinct volcanoes, mineral localities, and major landforms.
But unlike a university lecture it offers a route, as a self-guided tour, for anyone to drive from place to place, starting or stopping at any point.
When Prof Fordyce’s Marsden research is completed in February his official time at the university will come to an end.
