A Devonian Tribute

This is a poster I made as a farewell gift for a postdoc who was in the Otago lab. I worked with him for a little over 3 years and he taught me a lot of the tricks of the trade when it comes molecular biology. So I am forever grateful for his patience and perseverance in turning an absolute gel-jockey n00b into someone with some l33t skillz when it comes to stuff like genotyping, multiplexing, phylogenetic analysis, etc.

Why all the Devonian fishes? Well, (a) I like drawing prehistoric beasties (even if they don't always turn out the way I intended), and (b) the postdoc's name's Devon and the head of the lab made a pun about the end of the "Second Devonian era" so it clicked in my head. People don't quite realize that often their off-hand remarks can get lodge in my brain where they grow and ferment, then a few days later my mind vomits out something like this.

I have tried to make sure most of the major groups were represented by at least one species, and in the corner is a cheeky Tiktaalik representing Sarcopterygii > Tetrapodomorpha lineage, to remind us that, as Ray Troll might put it, "We are Fish".

Personally, I would have like to draw more placoderms, but because the poster was for Devon after all, I decided to include a few more elasmobranchs/chondrichthyans because he did his PhD on the population genetics of blacktip sharks.