“I’ve always held Itasca in a special place in my heart.”
“It’s a special and precious honor that I received from the U of M, because it is my alma mater.”
When paleobotanist David Dilcher hiked the time-worn trails at Itasca Biological Station and Laboratories this fall, he was completing the circle on a journey that began 51 years before—and led to the Lower Cretaceous and back.
Discoverer of the oldest known fossil flower and widely considered the father of modern angiosperm paleobotany, Dilcher got a taste of the amazing complexity and diversity of plant life while wandering the woods at Itasca as a University of Minnesota undergraduate student in the 1950s. Piling a bunch of fellow students in the Biology Club, into a borrowed station wagon, then-natural history student Dilcher would drive up to the field station in the spring to study ephemeral woodland wildflowers.
“That was a fantastic time,” he says. “I would go out with a small handbook called Spring Flowering Plants and walk along the trail. When I found a spring flower, I’d sit down next to it, open this book up, detail all the characteristics of this plant, identify it, then do the next one. I suppose it was like bird watching, except spring flower watching.”
Now a graduate research professor at the University of Florida and curator of paleobotany at the Florida Museum of Natural History, Dilcher returned to Itasca this September for the station’s centennial celebration. This time, instead of pursuing plants, he was on hand to receive an honorary doctorate of science degree, conferred on him by the Regents of the University of Minnesota in recognition of his illustrious career and numerous contributions to research and teaching.
The trek back to Minnesota, not surprisingly, triggered many memories of Dilcher’s own days as an undergraduate and then master’s degree student. Interested in pretty much everything, he had a hard time settling on a specific course of study—until he was taken under wing by botany professor John Hall. Hall hired Dilcher as an assistant, and then mentored him as he followed a winding path that eventually led to a Ph.D. at Yale University.
Once established in the field of angiosperm paleobotany, Dilcher wasted no time turning it upside down. “When I started, the field was matching a fossil leaf to a living leaf,” he recalls. “I started looking at epidermal cell patterns and I found that about 70 percent of the leaves from the area I was working on had been misidentified.” He ended up literally writing a book on how to study fossil angiosperm leaves as a young faculty member at Indiana University—and, in the 1990s, identifying angiosperm traits in a Lower Cretaceous period fossil from China that is still on record as the oldest flower known to humankind.
Dilcher has earned numerous honors over the years, including election to the National Academy of Sciences. But among his most cherished are those that honor excellence in teaching as well as research. At least in part because of the life-altering guidance he received at the U of M, Dilcher has always valued the opportunity to mentor others—including current Itasca station director David Biesboer, who was a graduate student at Indiana University when Dilcher was on faculty there.
“This attitude about teaching comes directly from my background in Minnesota, the upbringing I had, where we were taught not to think we were important but how to serve other people,” Dilcher says. “I always approach my students as my friends, my colleagues, and I learn from them as they learning from me.”
— Mary Hoff
