Neil and Ted's Excellent Adventure, continued

"It’s very rare in a career that you get to explore a whole new place that no one has looked at before," Neil says. "A place like this that’s so vast and so clearly in the right time period is a great opportunity for us. That’s why we’re so excited."

What started Neil and Ted on the road to the Arctic North was really just another happenstance in their careers of happy happenstances. "Last year, Neil and I were looking at maps and we saw there was this whole section of Devonian-age rock up in the Canadian Arctic that had not been explored for fossils," he says.

The pair did further research to make sure that the rock was definitely Devonian and consulted with geologists who had done work there. The problem, though, was finding funding for such an exploratory mission; transportation alone, for a party of six, could run $30,000. Most foundations want to see concrete findings before investing any grant money.

Ted found a way around the maze of red tape of government grants and such. He found an anonymous donor, actually a couple, who came in from out of town last year to see Dinofest, the Academy’s dinosaur extravaganza, and who developed an interest in Ted’s work. They agreed to lay out more than $100,000 for a year of research, including the field work and equipment costs, plus staff and other support for the work that will begin once the team gets back from Nunavut. If the expedition generates some results — and Neil and Ted are confident it will — the donors have agreed to fund a second year and a second trip.

Not only do Neil and Ted stand to burnish their reputations if they lead a successful expedition but so do their associated institutions, Penn and the Academy. The Academy perhaps stands to gain the most. A hundred years ago the Academy of Natural Sciences was arguably the premier institute in North America for the study of paleontology. Since then the field has slid from the Academy’s priorities. Though many Philadelphians may think of the Academy as an exhibition hall, it is actually primarily a research institute. Now, with its sponsorship of Neil and Ted’s expedition — its first such sponsorship in a century — the Academy could regain prestige in the field of paleontology.

The Arctic might seem an obvious choice for a paleontologist, but, says Ted, "Nobody has ever had the balls to plan an expedition to go up there."

But what, precisely, are Neil and Ted hoping to find on their Arctic adventure? The pair note that they hope to gather information about the development of the earliest ecosystems — primitive forests — that first appeared in the Devonian. But, says Ted, "right now, the thing we would get the most recognition for, the thing that we could get published in the most prestigious journals would be related to the evolution of limbs — the earliest of the limbed animals. Or at the other end, fish that are just beginning to develop limblike structures."

"The idea is, how did fish leave the water and begin to walk on land?" Neil says. "I don’t know what specific thing we’ll find, but we’ll be able to look at one of the key transitions in evolution and say some very important things about it."

In other words, they’re on a hunt for the proverbial missing links.

The Field Museum’s John Bolt, who considers the pair’s Pennsylvania work "quite amazing," says of the Arctic expedition, "If they find any Devonian tetrapod matter at all, it would likely be a new species, and this would be very important because there’s not a lot of material on the very early evolution of tetrapods. Consequently, we don’t understand it very well." However, he cautions, "I have no doubt at all that additional tetrapod material will be found from the Devonian. Whether it’s from this locality I don’t know and neither do they."

Stacking the deck in their favor, Neil and Ted are bringing along some expedition-seasoned colleagues: graduate student Marcus Davis, plus three Harvard colleagues with Arctic experience — Farish Jenkins, a professor who was Neil’s graduate adviser, the fossil preparator Bill Amaral, and Chuck Schaff, "an expert fossil collector," according to Neil, and the head of the vertebrate paleontology collection at Harvard.

But six guys keeping close quarters for weeks on end could have its upsides and its downsides — perhaps depending on how long the liquor supply lasts. But Neil and Ted have thought of that.

"We’re going with these guys because we’ve both worked with them for a long time. They’re known quantities," Neil says.

"It may be dysfunctional, but we know everybody’s dysfunctions," Ted chimes in.

"You know when not to talk to somebody. When to talk to somebody."

"We know who cooks well and who doesn’t."

"Who talks in their sleep."

So last Wednesday, the crew trundled off with the last of their backpacks and bags (most supplies had been shipped ahead), ready to spend five weeks living in tents in weather that will hover between 30-something and 50-something degrees with the wind-chill factor sometimes making it considerably colder. With 24 hours of daylight, they’ll have plenty of time to work, but will probably keep to a schedule of 7 to 7, often walking 10 to 15 miles a day, scouring the surface of the rock for signs of fossils. Just in case, they’ll have a GPS satellite tracking system that can orient them in a snowstorm or when they’re near the magnetic North Pole (as they will be at one of the three sites they’re investigating); they’ll have shotguns in case of polar bears (unlikely but possible); and they’ll have two radio contacts a day with a base 300 miles away. If the base doesn’t hear from them for 24 hours they send out a rescue team.

Now that the Nunavut crew has embarked on its evolutionary fact-finding mission, it seems that an eerie prediction Neil and Ted received last year turned out to be true. Neil tells the story of how, after they came upon this paleontological final frontier in their book of geological maps, they went out for a celebratory Chinese meal. "We ate lunch and we broke open our fortune cookies," Neil recalls, "and mine said, ‘You will soon be on the top of the world.’"