2023 Gilbert Harris Award to Stephen Westrop

October 26, 2023

The Gilbert Harris Award is given annually by PRI, in recognition of excellence in contributions to systematic paleontology, to a scientist who, through outstanding research and commitment to the centrality of systematics in paleontology, has made a significant contribution to the science. It is named after PRI's founder who dedicated his career to the pursuit of systematic paleontology. The award is presented at the Friends of PRI reception at the annual national meeting of the Geological Society of America.

The 2023 Gilbert Harris Award was presented this year to Dr. Stephen R. Westrop, Professor Emeritus in the School of Geosciences at the University of Oklahoma. His citation for this award follows. Click here for a list of prior Harris Award recipients.

Citation by Warren Allmon, Jon Hendricks, and Nigel Hughes

Since 1993, the Gilbert Harris Award has been presented annually by PRI in recognition of career excellence in systematic paleontology. The recipient is a scientist who, through outstanding research in and commitment to the centrality of systematics in paleontology, has made a significant contribution to the science.

Stephen Westrop received his undergraduate degree in 1976 from the Swansea University in Wales, and his PhD from the University of Toronto in 1984, where he was advised by Rolf Ludvigsen. Following an initial paper on Ordovician trilobite lifestyles, much of his PhD work on the late Cambrian trilobites of the Canadian Rockies of Alberta was published as an impressively substantive memoir in Palaeontographica Canadiana, a work that established Steve’s credentials as an outstanding systematic paleontologist while also honing his interest in the evolutionary, ecological, and taphonomic controls on species distribution. That work set the standard for Steve’s approach to taxonomy: careful and considered descriptions based on sample sizes sufficient to provide some account of ontogenetic and phenotypic variation, and illustrated by plates the figures of which were of a sufficient size and range of perspectives to give a comprehensive understanding of body form. Such a standard has been maintained in six subsequent monographs, and in a long series of research papers. This systematics-based approach has been the foundation of all Steve’s later work, no matter how far removed from taxonomy itself. Furthermore, it has been based almost exclusively on Steve’s own prodigious collecting in the field, which has been done with meticulous attention to sedimentary and stratigraphic context. Everything Steve does, he does thoroughly and carries through to completion.

Building on his PhD thesis, Steve became a leading authority on Cambrian and Ordovician trilobites from Laurentia. His work, with its anchor in descriptive systematics, has been applied to leading macroevolutionary questions through the linkage of species-based systematics to paleoecology through the quantitative recognition of biofacies using numerical analyses of species abundance patterns. Via their “dual biostratigraphy” approach Steve and Rolf gave fluctuations in trilobite biodiversity, including Pete Palmer’s famous “biomeres”, a firm empirical basis.  They used this to approach to questions such as the extent to which shifts in sedimentary regime and accommodation space might relate to secular changes in relative sealevel rather than factors peculiar to that particular interval of Earth history. In doing so Steve clarified and made the “biomere” concept, which was previously hard to contextualize within a broader evolutionary perspective, available for comparative analysis.

Steve has also been keenly interested in whether changes in clade diversity between the Cambrian and the Ordovician represent replacement of one fauna by another, or simply the dilution effects of a net biodiversity increase. Ever the taxonomist, he has been central to estimates of biodiversity changes based on species abundance, and on dissecting the contribution to collection and local/regional diversity to provincial or global biodiversity. He likewise has explored what makes species susceptible to extinction while keeping an eye out for taphonomic effects that might distort apparent species abundances. His work has been widely recognized as exemplary, for example in Mark Patskowsky and Steve Holland’s excellent and influential text book Stratigraphic Paleobiology. Ludvigsen and Westrop were also initially seen as radical for their provocative but compelling, and ultimately universally accepted, suggestion of new stage names for the later Cambrian of Laurentia. Legend has it that as they drove away from one of the field meetings in the western U.S., one of the doyens of the American Cambrian proclaimed “there go the stage-coach boys”.

After a postdoc in Memorial University in Newfoundland from 1986 to 1988, Steve became a professor at Brock University in St. Catherines, Ontario, rising through the ranks to become full professor there before moving to Oklahoma in 1998. In Norman he became first the Willard L. Miller Professor and later the Anadarko Centennial Professor in the School of Geosciences at the University of Oklahoma and the curator of invertebrate paleontology for the Sam Noble Museum of Natural History, at which he became emeritus in 2021. Steve has published more than 170 papers, mainly descriptions of species of Cambrian and Ordovician trilobites from eastern Canada, Oklahoma, the Rocky and Mackenzie Mountains and their implications in taphonomy, biostratigraphy, paleoecology, and macroevolution, and he has also contributed to regional geological and tectonic history. His is a long list of collaborators, especially Jon Adrain and Ed Landing among other professional paleontologists, and he has had a continuous and diverse stream of research students including Lisa Amati, Jesse Carlucci, Stephen Cuggy, Sandy Dengle, Jennifer Eoff, Talia Karim, Rob Swisher, and Shelly Wernette, among others. Steve also generously served his professional community as editor of the Journal of Paleontology and his time in that office was known for efficiency and judicious management. He has also been on the International Cambrian Subcommission.

Steve was with his beloved partner Kathy for 40 years before her untimely death in 2017, a bitter blow which he bore with extraordinary resolve. Their two sons, Jeff and David, both continue the family’s environmental/biological interests.

In summary, it is hard to imagine a more appropriate recipient of this award than Steve Westrop. For all his achievement, rooted deeply in his contributions to systematic paleontology, it is with pleasure and honor that the Paleontological Research Institution presents its 2023 Gilbert Harris Award to Steve Westrop.