ROGER KAESLER'S ‘ACCIDENTAL' CONODONT STUDENT: A TRIBUTE TO A CAREFUL AND CARING ‘DOKTOR VATER'

After I came to the University of Kansas in 1967 to work with R.C. Moore on crinoid columnals and fragmentary echinoderm remains, I began to have doubts about applying non-zoological, parataxa classifications to such fossils. Fortunately, I was able to convince Prof. Curt Teichert of my interest in conodonts, a group with parallel taxonomic problems. Roger Kaesler taught micropaleontology at KU and so somewhat accidentally, I became his Ph.D. student.

Roger was a tall, lean and meticulous man, with a wry sense of humor and with a neat, almost clinical, elongate office/laboratory. Because of his own quantitative ‘bent' and because he had applied biometric methods in his Ph.D. study of the paleoecology of foraminifera of Todos Santos Bay, Mexico, Roger ‘encouraged' me to apply similar methods to measure the environmental controls on conodonts in the Late Pennsylvanian Shawnee Group.

When, after barely a year as his student, I told Roger that I couldn't afford to stay at KU, he strongly supported my alternate plan of going to Philipps University in Marburg, Germany to work under Professors Maurits Lindström and Willi Ziegler. With his support, I won (and miraculously was able to keep) both NSF and DAAD fellowships, spending an invaluable year studying Kansas conodonts with the masters.

Roger set high standards, allowed great independence, but was both protective and helpful, as the situation demanded. Early on, he temporarily stopped my dissertation proposal defence to prevent me from being caught between competing committee members. While I was in Germany, he had my data transferred to punch cards, probably taking the card deck for computer analysis himself, before sending me the results for evaluation. Later, he likely influenced publication of my work in its entirety by KU.

Ronald Taylor, an ostracode specialist, and I, a conodont worker, were apparently Roger's first Ph.D. students, graduating in 1972. At the time, Roger told me he didn't think he understood conodonts sufficiently to confidently supervise future conodont students; nevertheless, my ability to demonstrate that Pennsylvanian conodonts were strongly environmentally controlled, my reconstruction of Pennsylvanian conodont apparatuses, as well as my application of multielement taxonomy to Pennsylvanian conodonts, all firsts, were in large measure due to him.