Farish Jenkins, paleontologist and polymath, died on November 11th aged 72

INDIANA JONES is the ultimate action -hero academic: played by Harrison Ford, the indomitable professor outwits Nazis and other villains in search of religious relics, lost temples and alien artefacts. Farish Jenkins preferred a rifle to a bullwhip, and it was palaeontology, not archaeology, that he made glamorous. But he did have a stylish hat, a military background and adventures in wild places. His adoring students dubbed him the real life version of the cinematic creation.

Arriving at Yale to study geology in 1964, he was told that all major aspects of vertebrate evolution were already understood. He feared that he and his friends would be left “to build our careers with carefully stacked minutiae”. In fact, “titanic” discoveries awaited. But to crack the secrets of the fossil world, he had to master not only the rocks but the organisms they hid. He was the first Yale Graduate School student to cross over to the Medical School, to study anatomy and embryology.

Later, he illustrated his lectures with fine anatomical drawings, painstakingly rendered with what he proudly called Harvard's best collection of sharpened chalks (he was not a PowerPoint person). When necessary, he would draw bones and muscles on his own suit. To illustrate the body's natural shock-absorbers, he would stomp round the room on a peg leg, reading the description of Captain Ahab's gait in “Moby Dick”. Students loved that, and how he timed his lectures to the second.

He had no time for academic squabbles and protocol, brushing off rebukes and bureaucratic constraints. Charm was his first weapon, obstinacy his second. It was not just his clothes and vocabulary that were old-fashioned. He prized thoroughness. Unusually for modern academia, he showered praise on colleagues and deprecated his own triumphs. But he was a mighty foe when roused. He could swear like a Marine, “without repeating myself” and helped oust the abrasive Larry Summers from the Harvard presidency.

The first field trip was to Africa, where his “very close and extremely naive encounters” with the local fauna included a self-portrait with a black rhino (plentiful as “rats in a dump” in those days). The beast took offence and charged; Mr Jenkins made it back to his car minus a lens cap. Living vertebrates, he decided, were just as interesting as their extinct relatives.

High speed cineradiography, plus treadmills and a wind tunnel gave him new insights into how animals move: walking, trotting, galloping, flying and brachiating (the way monkeys swing). His efforts reached, he said proudly, “circus-like” proportions. “Tree shrews ricocheted across my bookshelves and desk,” he recalled. University bosses were appalled. His students and colleagues were captivated.

But fieldwork was even more fun. The most arduous expeditions were to east Greenland and arctic Canada, armed with lavatory paper to wrap the fossils, and chocolate bars for the diggers. Mr Jenkins was a distinctive addition to the landscape: invariably well-dressed, and sporting a beloved Czechoslovak rabbit-fur hat, a pocket-watch, a flask of vodka and a gun. He rigged trip wires and automatic rifle fire to deter polar bears from the camp at night. A cast of a huge paw print in his office was a souvenir of a particularly narrow escape.

The trophies of those trips were carefully chipped open at Harvard. One proved to be the great find of his life: Tiktaalik roseae. “Rose” was the Christian name of an anonymous benefactor who subsidised the expeditions. Tiktaalik was a homage to his Inuit hosts: their word for a large freshwater fish. In fossil-speak the discovery was “the elpistostegalian central to understanding the emergence of tetrapods”. In layman's language, it was a 375m-year-old fish with legs, a rudimentary ear and a snout for catching prey—a vital clue to how living beings first moved from sea to land.

Smart man

Another big find was what he called the “ugliest animal in the world”. It was a 210m-year-old armoured marine creature. Mr Jenkins spotted its distinguishing feature: that it opened its mouth by lifting its upper jaw. He was crucial in discovering the world's earliest known frog, which unlike its salamander-like ancestors had hind legs for jumping. He found that in 1981 in the Arizona desert. It initially looked like “road kill”, his colleague Neil Shubin said: a 190m-year-old mash of four different frog skeletons. The two men spent the next 14 years picking them apart and putting them back together. They named their find Prosalirus bitis, combining a Latin word meaning “leap forward” with a Navajo word for “high above it”.

After a bout of cancer he dismissed a visitor's worries, saying: “as a palaeontologist, I'm familiar with extinction.” In his spare time he trapped the chipmunks that infested his barn and made prodigious quantities of cider from his own apples.