Beth Shapiro

When I started my PhD research trying to reconstruct the extinction dynamics of the ice age megafauna, my supervisor gave me a copy of this book for inspiration. And it is an inspirational story: not only about the bison named Blue Babe, but about the place, the time, and the people working to try to figure out what it must have been like to be an animal living in that frozen steppe. I’m still working on these questions, having spent many summers digging for bones in that frozen step. I have met many of the people featured in Dr. Guthrie’s account, and even took a piece of Blue Babe himself and sequenced his DNA. And yet every time I open this book I find something new, and am again inspired.