James Hagadorn, Paleontologist: Traces of Early Animal Life

In the Inyo Mountains of California, paleontologist James Hagedorn looks for clues in the rocks for organisms that lived over 500 million years ago—a hard thing to do since most organisms weren’t preserved. Instead he looks for tracks of the first steps animals took. Hagedorn finds these tracks in rocks from 560 million years ago when there was a revolution in body plans. The evidence he finds indicates that these animals were capable of hunting others, a development that changed the course of animal evolution.