Our small group of UH students and faculty descended into Las Vegas airport on the evening of March 26, 2006.  After navigating through the throngs of tourists and rows of electronic gambling devices, we collected our bags, secured some vehicles and made our way into the peaceful isolation of the desert.  While Oahu was being barraged by unusually intense and frequent rainstorms, our systems were adjusting to the cool aridity of eastern California.  The air seemed to suck the moisture right out of our skin!

A few hours after landing, we pulled into the town of Shoshone, California, nearly missing it for its diminutive size.  We settled into the field house and then set out into the hills first thing in the morning.  Martin Kennedy, Mary Droser, and their students were incredibly warm hosts and great sources of information.  As we picked our way over the rocky landscape, they would draw our attention to geological features, explain their significance and how they were formed.  Geology is a pretty foreign subject for me, so the learning curve was steep!

First visiting Neoproterozoic and then early Cambrian formations, the UC Riverside crew described the local dynamics that created the unique stratigraphy there as well as the global context in which it arose.  Because each person in our group was working on understanding separate aspects of metazoan evolution, this information helped us synthesize a more coherent picture of how animals may have emerged on Earth.  However, I also gained an appreciation for how limited our sources of evidence are and that every theory about the Earth’s history is indeed a hypothesis that is continually being questioned and tested.

In the final moments of our field time, a handful of us raced down a peak where we had been looking for Ediacaran fossils to search out trilobites in a shallow gulley.  The weather was cold, blustery and drizzly, but it was only the diminishing sunlight that turned us away from enthusiastically sorting through shaly rocks to find these 500 million year old fossils!  There is a strange and awe-inspiring thrill to poring through a pile of rocks and discovering the imprint of an ancient animal that gave rise to so many of the organisms that exist now.