Wayne Pryor died this past year, which reminded me of why we should always express our thanks to people who have helped us, because you never know if that chance might disappear tomorrow. If I had to point to any one person who was responsible for my being involved in ichnology today (besides me), it would be Wayne Pryor. He provided the catalyst for my interest in a subject that is regarded by many as a specialty although it is not: it is a discipline that straddles geology and biology equally but crosses easily into other disciplines that we give names (chemistry, physics, mathematics) to help our understanding of how the world works. Yet my exposure to such an influential person was only once a week over the course of 10 weeks, and I rarely was in touch with him afterward this time period despite the lasting impact he had on not just the course of my career, but my life.

In 1984, during the second year of my master's study at Miami University (of Ohio, the "real" Miami), graduate students there were informed that classes were being offered to students from Miami, Wright State University, and the University of Cincinnati through a consortium, meaning that students could get credit for taking a class at another university in a subject that might not be offered at your particular school. One of the first courses offered through this consortium was titled "Trace Fossils and Ichnology," taught by Wayne Pryor at the University of Cincinnati. Because I was interested in paleontology at the time and was working on the description and interpretation of a micromorphic molluscan fauna in the Late Ordovician Cincinnatian Series, I thought "Why not?" to taking what I thought would be just a paleontology course. Of course, my prejudicial assumption, which we ichnologists still experience from people today who do not study or otherwise use ichnology, was wrong.

I went to the class in Cincinnati with a fellow grad student and good friend at Miami, Jay Close, who was working on interpreting the Mississippian-Pennsylvanian boundary in eastern Kentucky for his master's thesis but eventually became an expert on the geology of coal methane, particularly in the Cretaceous of the Western Interior. Jay was interested in the course more as a sedimentologist who knew the reputation of Pryor as a sedimentologist, thus he and I were the only two Miami students interested in such a seemingly esoteric subject. At the first class meeting (which was for two-and-a-half hours once a week on a Tuesday night), we found that we shared the class with about 10 University of Cincinnati students and a few Wright State students, which made for a class of about 15 people.

Soon Jay and I found out, through direct experience, that Wayne Pryor was a nice guy and a master teacher. I was instantly impressed with his breadth of expertise in geology, which came across without a hint of pretension. Although I have difficulty remembering any specific class (in stark contrast to any individual field trip), I remember clearly that the overwhelming theme of his teaching was the holistic and interconnectiveness of ichnology as a science, how the modern and ancient worlds blended as one through the interactions and the results of actions of animals. He brought in samples of trace fossils that we had to draw (teaching us to observe), we saw slides and films of animals burrowing (when, as Richard Bromley (1996) has correctly pointed out, many ichnologists have never watched an animal burrow), we wrote papers on selected topics in ichnology and gave class presentations on the same topics, and we went on a field trip to look at trace fossils in the Cincinnatian made famous originally by Osgood (1970).

Probably the most important single sedimentological concept I learned from him is the main point of one of his best-known papers (Pryor, 1975), which is that mud is mostly deposited as sand-sized pellets through the activities of organisms, whether as feces or pseudofeces. I still get in arguments, mostly with American geologists, about how their mudstones may represent rapid deposition and may not have been the products of mere inorganic "flocculation" (especially if their mudstones show no evidence of bioturbation or anoxia). Although Pryor's point was not universal, it was certainly thought-provoking. I will never look at shales again as exclusive products of "gentle rains from heaven."

However, the most important lesson I learned from Wayne Pryor was in a simple exchange of personal conversation. I remember going to the front of the classroom after class the first day to introduce myself, and while talking with him he asked me what I was studying for my master's thesis.

I replied, "I'm interpreting a micromorphic fossil assemblage in the Cincinnatian." He asked, "What trace fossils do you have in the rocks?"

My reply was "Oh, there aren't any." He quietly and confidently said, "The trace fossils are there. You just have to look for them."

He was right: the trace fossils were there, and when I found them, their presence helped me to reinterpret the paleoenvironmental setting for my micromorphic assemblage in a way that had never been done before (the assemblage was composed of juveniles, not stunted or paedomorphic individuals). I became more interested in trace fossils as a result of his class and in my letters of inquiry to potential doctoral programs, I sent a letter to Robert (Bob) Frey at the University of Georgia, whom I had never met but now knew of his work through Pryor. Bob wrote back to me, I moved to Georgia, and have been here ever since. In this way, my life was literally changed by Pryor's course.

Since that day that Wayne Pryor told me that I needed to look for trace fossils in order to find them, I have held his statement close to my heart. Whenever I look at rocks anywhere in the world, I assume that trace fossils will be there and am very disappointed if I do not find any.

Luis Buatois and I experienced this disillusionment together while on a field trip near Alicante, Spain, this past April, where he and I went to a outcrop of Miocene strata containing spectacular soft-sediment deformation features (the main focus of the field trip). Slightly more than 15 years after Wayne Pryor told me traces would be wherever I looked, Luis and I could not find them. This was a humbling reminder for both of us young and sometimes self-confident ichnologists that maybe the traces were not there, or maybe we need a few more years more of experience before we can see them. However, the thought that the traces should be there would not have been a shared one if not for Wayne Pryor, and I would not have even been participating in such an earnest intellectual search on the southeastern coast of Spain with a broad-minded friend like Luis if not for Wayne Pryor's statement. The same goes for all interactions I have had with the menagerie of other ichnologists, most of whom I have met through the Ichnofabric Workshops in places far removed from Cincinnati, Ohio (although I first met Richard Bromley and drank my first beer with him in Cincinnati, as I recall).

Thank you, Wayne Pryor, and thanks to all of the people who have taught me. Now let's go look for some more trace fossils, especially in places where people have said they are not.

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