About Sam
“Dad told me it was a fossil and explained that it was the remains of an ancient animal preserved in the rock for millions of years. I’ve been hooked ever since.”
Sam W. Heads (2019)¹
Sam William Heads was born in April 1983 in Northumberland, England. He found his first fossil at age five during a walk with his dad along the coast of the North Sea, and recalls it as being “something very curious; a rock, about the size of my hand, with a sea shell embedded in it.” He no longer has that special fossil, which has likely been lost to the vagaries of childhood, but remembers its discovery as being a particularly important childhood event, explaining that “dad told me it was a fossil and explained that it was the remains of an ancient animal preserved in the rock for millions of years” and that he’s “been hooked ever since.”¹
“In order to understand biodiversity, we must have an understanding of the evolution of life; and any understanding of the evolution of life must include an understanding of the fossil record.”
Sam W. Heads (2019)¹
Sam is a palaeontologist with a passion for arthropods. His research is focused primarily on fossil insects—mostly those from the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras—and their modern descendants. Over the course of his career, Sam has visited countless museums around the world, to study both fossil and modern insects, and has undertaken fieldwork on almost every continent (Antarctica is the only one left on his bucket list). Since 2009, he has worked at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. There, in 2017, he founded the Illinois Center for Paleontology² where he currently serves as Director and Curator-in-Charge.
He received his Ph.D. from the University of Portsmouth in 2009 for work on the taxonomy and systematics of fossil Orthoptera (grasshoppers and crickets), is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and a Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Sources:
¹ People of PRI: Sam Heads, PRI Center for Paleontology director and curator. By Daniellle Ruffatto, 16 August 2019.
² Illinois Center for Paleontology, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Image credits
Header image: Heads hunting for fossils in the Badlands of South Dakota in 2016 (credit: Danielle Ruffatto)