Roger Portell, collections director of invertebrate paleontology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, has retired this month after 42 years on the job.
To mark the occasion, members of the Paleontological Society recently organized a day-long session in honor of his work and mentorship at their annual conference, which was held in Denver this year from Oct. 11-14.
Portell’s colleagues also nominated him for the society’s Pojeta Award , which is given in recognition of exceptional professional and public service in the field of paleontology. Portell was presented with the award during a banquet on Sunday, Oct. 11.
“What I want people to know most about Roger is just how much he’s done for other paleontologists. I can’t think of an individual who’s done more in service of this discipline than Roger,” said Jonathan Hendricks, curator of paleontology at the Milwaukee Public Museum and one of the society members who nominated Roger for the award.
Portell began working at the museum after a short career in both restaurant management and banking left an unmet yearning in his life that he filled by hunting for fossils on weekends. When he discovered a partial skeleton of an archaeocete — a type of extinct cetacean, related to modern whales — and began assembling it in the dining room of his cramped apartment, his girlfriend (soon-to-be wife) said he’d need to get a job at a museum if he wanted to keep collecting at his current pace.
He took her advice to heart. Though he already had a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Auburn University, he enrolled as an undergraduate student at the University of Florida to study geology. A year after graduating a second time, he was working as a laboratory technician in the Florida Museum’s invertebrate paleontology collection. Three years later, he was appointed full-time manager of the collection, with a subsequent promotion to director in 2008, a position he held until retiring.
Under his stewardship, the collection has grown from a modest 12,000 specimens to its present number of more than seven million. This extensive growth is due, in large part, to the same impulse that led him to collect and articulate a fossil whale in his dining room — he’s passionate about fieldwork.
Portell has participated in fossil collecting trips throughout large parts of North and South America and the Caribbean Islands, with a special focus on fossils preserved during the Miocene in Panama and Chile, the Pleistocene in the Bahamas, the Eocene to Pleistocene in Florida, and various time periods in Cuba and Jamaica.
He rarely ever went on these trips alone. More often, he indulged in another lifelong passion of sharing the wonders of the natural world by organizing and leading expeditions for professional paleontologists, avocational experts, high school teachers and college students from across the country.
Jonathan Hendricks, who’s known Portell since he met him in a Florida shell aggregate pit in 1998 is among the latter group.
“The first time I met him was as an undergrad,” Hendricks said. “I was at the University of Wisconsin, and my geology class took a spring break field trip to Florida, and Roger got us into a quarry. That day in the field changed the entire trajectory of where I was going with my own research. I was going to study dinosaurs and other vertebrates, but then I went to one of those shell pits. It’s intoxicating. I don’t know how else to describe it. It’s piles upon piles of shells, with maybe more than 1,000 species and an almost incalculable number of specimens.”
Hendricks went on to study invertebrates and has collaborated on a number of projects with Portell, and his case not an isolated incident. Many of the people who nominated Portell for the award and helped organize the special conference session are individuals who he similarly helped along the way.
“Many managers might put all of their efforts into the collections, with little interest in interacting with the wider profession or public. Roger has done the opposite,” wrote Mark Patzkowsky, professor emeritus of geosciences at Pennsylvania State University. “Through his mentoring, he has inspired countless students to pursue paleontology, and many of those students are now outstanding scientists making their own contributions to the field.”
Portell is also scrupulous in the collection. Not only has he significantly expanded the collection’s size, he’s also led a sustained digitization effort that includes photographing specimens and entering all of the information associated with them into an online, freely accessible database that allows paleontologists around the world to use them in their own research.
“It’s a huge collection, but it’s really the digitization that I think sets it apart from many other peer institutions. And that’s all from Roger and his team chipping away at the work a little bit every day for so many years,” Hendricks said.
Michal Kowalewski, a curator of invertebrate paleontology in the museum who has worked closely with Roger for over a decade, echoed this sentiment.
“It’s thanks to Roger’s incessant efforts that our collections have become one of the largest repositories of invertebrate fossils in North America. But there is more to it,” Kowalewski wrote. “Over the years, Roger has perfected strategies for organizing and managing museum collections. He has established the gold standard that is renowned within the museum community and often emulated.”
Working with colleagues, Portell helped secure more than $2.8 million in grant funding from multiple sources to pay for improvements to the collection and for research, which he was also actively engaged in throughout his career. As of this year, he is the single or co-author of more than 160 peer-reviewed scientific publications, with more currently in development. He’s additionally published nearly 300 scientific abstracts, most of them in conference proceedings, for which he or one of his colleagues gave public presentations.
But rather than giving a talk in a lecture hall, Portell often prefers to give poster presentations, which involve more one-on-one interactions.
“Roger doesn’t seek the limelight. I’ve never seen him give a talk. He’s very personable, and I think he just really likes talking to people,” Hendricks said.
The subject of his research has been — in almost every case — invertebrate paleontology. Working solo and with colleagues, he’s discovered and named more than 100 species based on fossil material and has had six species named after him, including a type of sea cow that walked on legs .
In the near future, he intends to take a well-deserved break to spend time with family. But at some point, he’ll turn his single-minded attention and meticulous work ethic back to the few remaining projects he has left unfinished.
“To say that Roger is an overachiever is a gross understatement,” Kowalewski wrote. “His dedication, professionalism and profound knowledge of geology and paleontology really set him apart from us mortals. He can do anything and everything well, and he does. For someone like me, who has been working with him for years, it can be quite annoying to be reminded daily of one’s own mediocrity, but this does not make it any less admirable.”