Roger Lansing Grande (born February 16, 1951), more commonly known as Lance Grande, is an evolutionary biologist and curatorial scientist. His research and work is focused on Paleontology, Ichthyology, Systematics and Evolution. He is best known for his work on the paleontology of the Green River Formation and for his detailed monographs on the comparative anatomy and evolution of ray-finned fishes.
Grande has won the PROSE award for Professional and Scholarly Excellence from the Association of American Publishers twice, for his books Gems and Gemstones and The Lost World of Fossil Lake. In 2012, he won the Robert H. Gibbs, Jr. Memorial Award from the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists "for an Outstanding Body of Published Work in Systematic Biology." In 2013, he was appointed as the Field Museum of Natural History's first Distinguished Service Curator, after serving eight and a half years as head of the museum's Collections and Research division and museum Senior Vice President. Grande has received numerous research grants from National Science Foundation, Negaunee Foundation and Tawani Foundation. He has named over 68 species and other new taxa and published over 150 scientific articles, books and monographs. The extinct bird Calciavis grandei and the extinct garfish Atractosteus grandei are named in honour of him.
Early life and education
Grande grew up in Richfield, Minnesota. He developed an early interest in the natural world as a hobby. He collected fishes from a local pond, and rocks and fossils from local gravel pits. He worked his way through college for his bachelor's degree working a variety of jobs including one as a US Army medic. He started with an Economics/Business major, but by the end of his junior year he had switched to natural history.
Grande received a BS in geology in 1976 and a double MS in Geology and Zoology in 1979 from the University of Minnesota. His master's thesis was on a group of 40 million- to 58 million-year-old fossil localities in western North America collectively known as the Green River Formation. In late 1978, he submitted part of his thesis to be published as a book, attracting the attention of Colin Patterson at the Natural History Museum in London. Patterson recommended him to his colleagues Gareth Nelson and Donn Rosen at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. As a consequence of that recommendation, Grande received a fellowship for a PhD program through the American Museum and the City University of New York under the guidance of Nelson and Rosen. Grande moved to New York and began the program in 1979 and received a PhD in evolutionary biology in 1983. His published Masters thesis later became an important work on the Green River Formation that by 2004 had gone through two editions and four printings.
Career
In 1983, Grande was hired by the Field Museum in Chicago as curator of fossil fishes, where he continued working for the next several decades. Over the years he has been a content specialist for some of the Field Museum's most successful exhibits, including Evolving Planet and The Grainger Hall of Gems. He has led over 60 expeditions to prospect for and collect fossils in Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and Mexico. During his curatorship the fossil fish collection more than doubled in size. Over much of his research career, Grande collaborated with Willy Bemis, on the comparative anatomy and evolution of ray-finned fishes (Actinopterygii). Grande and Bemis built an integrative project lasting more than 15 years in an attempt to better understand the base of the evolutionary tree for ray-finned fishes. With funding from the National Science Foundation, they traveled to 12 different countries and 14 different states to study museum collections, resulting in a number of influential publications. A 1998 article in Science magazine called their collaborative work "a model of what should be done to carry comparative biology [into] the 21st century." They also published a comparative anatomy text book with two other coauthors that was adopted by many universities across the United States.
Grande served as Senior Vice President of Field Museum and head of Collections and Research from 2004 through 2013. In 2008 he received the James A. Lovell Award from the Planetary Studies Foundation for helping to create The Robert A. Pritzker Center for Meteoritic and Polar Studies at the Field Museum.