I grew up in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on the westernmost valley and ridge in the Appalachian Mountains. Coal deliveries to our home for stoking the basement furnace during the cold winter months became the first geological quarry of my collecting career — the pyrite veins were irresistible in my eyes. Just blocks from my house stood an entire hillside of fossiliferous stone in which I collected trilobites and other fossils of the Paleozoic Era. As a guest investigator at an archeological site in Israel, I found a hippopotamus tooth that documented these animals living in the Jordan River some 780,000 years ago. However, I was most excited when, as a college student, I stumbled upon a boulder that later revealed a new genus and species of ancient fish, eventually given my family name — Sterropterygion brandei.