Ever since his mother gifted him a Trilobite fossil at age 5, Edwin F. and Martha Hahn Professor of Geology and 鶹Ӱ acting president Bob Gaines has been fascinated with hunting for history.
His latest quest, this one in western Utah, turned up dozens of specimens of a new species of sea sponge estimated to be half a billion years old—one of Earth’s earliest animals. And it’s named after James Turrell ’65, creator of Dividing the Light, the Skyspace at 鶹Ӱ.
In September, Gaines and his colleagues from Harvard described the new species of sea sponge in the paper “” in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The discovery is the result of three years of research conducted on a fossil-rich mountainside in Utah, where layers of shale preserved the specimens “in stunning detail,” Gaines says.
“Because there was preservation of the organic material, rather than a skeleton or a shell, it’s kind of an extraordinary view,” Gaines adds. “This is at the time when animals first diverged from single-celled ancestors, so we are able to capture what the early family tree of all the animals looked like and understand how the big branches in the animal family tree are related.”
As he pieces together periods of time by exploring new ground and investigating both rocks and fossils, Gaines finds the more he learns and investigates, the more questions about the history of life he encounters.
But the longtime Pomona professor remains thrilled to link extraordinary fossils to prehistoric times in his eternal quest to understand the environment in which living things existed.
“For me,” he says, “it’s about the nature of the earliest ecosystems of our own ancestors and their relationship to the Earth system and how they fed on each other. I’m constantly surprised. As a student, I recall well the long periods of confusion. But in retrospect, I’ve found that I’ve never really learned anything cool without being confused for some period of time first.”
More than two decades after publishing his first paper, Gaines had a personal record of 11 papers published in 2024.
With his work in Utah complete, he looks forward to taking time down the road to visit China, northern Greenland, Antarctica and other places around the world to continue his hunt for history.
“It’s been a good run,” Gaines says. “It’s a huge benefit, to be able to take a sabbatical and go out as a faculty member, learn things in the field and bring back that knowledge to share with students. It’s a tremendous opportunity to travel the world and do field work.”