Presentation of the 2023 Paleontological Society Medal to Carlton E. Brett

As many of us know, there is no place that Carl Brett would rather be during any waking moment than out in the field.Carl likes to put his eyes very close to the outcrop, and he has an innate ability to quickly diagnose unique attributes of individual horizons-unusual colors, modes of fossil preservation, depositional styles, ephemeral occurrences of taxa-that set them apart from their stratigraphic neighbors.Carl's boundless energy, encyclopedic memory of minute details, and talent for on-the-spot synthesis enable him to then quickly traverse numerous localities to determine whether these horizons are recognizable elsewhere, which they often are, even in the face of significant, lateral changes across a basin in their other internal characteristics.This painstaking modus operandi and Carl's extraordinary powers of synthesis have helped fuel his remarkable accomplishments in sequence and event stratigraphy.Carl and his collaborators have rewritten the stratigraphic frameworks of the Appalachian Basin, Cincinnati region, and elsewhere worldwide, increasingly integrating stable-isotopic, as well as faunal and lithological patterns into the mix, and determining the extent to which regional, stratigraphically confined patterns can be global in scope.These determinations lie at the heart of developing a truly integrative, high-resolution approach to Earth system history and have been evident in his papers since the 1990s.Carl spent his early childhood in New Hampshire, but moved at age ten to Grand Island in western New York where his father took a faculty position at Buffalo State.After the move, Carl quickly became fascinated by a chunk of Ordovician sandstone in his new backyard that contained a mold of the prolific bivalve, Ambonychia Hall, 1847.He soon found additional fossils and became hooked on paleontology, as an artist and scientist.Through his high school years, his burgeoning, selfdirected scientific interests in fossils quickly overtook his artistic endeavors, and, as a senior, Carl won the annual New York State Science Fair competition in 1969 for a study of size variation in the trilobite Phacops (now Eldredgeops) rana (Green, 1832) through the Hamilton Group in western New York.Carl completed his Bachelor's and Master's degrees at the University of Buffalo in 1973 and 1975, where he was mentored by Ed Buehler, a specialist in Devonian corals.Coming out of Buffalo, Carl's interests turned to crinoids, and he moved to the University of Michigan for his Ph.D., where he worked with Brad Macurda.Carl