I’m a New Zealander – paleontologist, geologist, photographer, traveler…. red-head.
I was born in Dunedin, but a few months later my family shifted to the small town of Alexandra (pop. c. 3,000 at the time). We (my sister came a little later) grew up next to a semi-wild pine forest that was on the other side of the road. A little later again, we moved a few kilometers out of town into the country. We had a big (very big) house, and much of the upstairs was devoted to my ‘museum’. These were the fossils I had started to collect from when I was 8 or 9 years old.

Our house in autumn. The tree was the largest in the whole basin. Apparently it was the tree the original run-holders used to tether their horses to. When a wild storm finally felled it, the upper branches impaled themselves in the nearest wall of the house.

And our house in winter. My 1952 Ford Anglia is sitting between the house and the big tree.
A family trip to the Haast when I was 10 turned up my first plant fossils – and those have been the focus of my research interests ever since.

I was THAT fresh-faced when I photographed Lady Di?
School was a bus or bike-ride away back in Alexandra, and then at 17 I left the mountains to start at the University of Otago. Towards the end and after finishing my PhD, I was a self-employed photographer in Dunedin, before shifting to Australia. After a post-doc in Tasmania and Queensland, I lectured ecology to groups of visiting American students. In 2007 I left the university and spent five years as a geologist, working mainly in Mongolia, Indonesia and Turkey.

With one of my University of California classes in the Border Ranges rainforest.
Travelers love to brag about how many countries they’ve visited. Well, I’ve traveled to over 76 – but what really is a ‘country’ and what does it mean to have ‘traveled it’? As a kind of alternative list – I’m seeing how many of the World Wildlife Fund ‘ecoregions’ I can travel to – and get a representative photo.