Where other people see rocks, geologist Beverly Saylor, PhD, sees a story. And not just any story—our story, the story of life on Earth.
Saylor, the Armington Professor focusing on stratigraphy and sedimentology at Case Western Reserve University, sees traces of the world as it once was, millions of years ago; she detects them in the layers of sediment, deposits of volcanic ash, and in fossilized remains of animals and plants.
And the decades she’s spent “looking at rocks as history books” have helped produce groundbreaking discoveries—like those she’s made with renowned paleoanthropologist Yohannes Haile-Selassie, PhD, curator of physical anthropology at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History and an adjunct professor at CWRU—that have changed our ideas about human evolution.