There are not many people in the world who can say that they were able to discover a fossil, but Gregory Buckley is not like many people.

Now an Associate Professor of Physics and Earth Science, Buckley was once a young paleontologist. Twenty-five years ago Buckley was only a graduate student working on his dissertation when he had made the decision to work and collect fossils from Madagascar.

At the time, the African country had only just opened back up to the world again after being insulated by the Soviet government, which also opened up the doors to the scientific community.

“There are a lot of different reasons that I wanted to work in Madagascar,” Buckley said. “I knew that there had been some really cool fossils that had been found there before, but [the country] was still a mystery.” Buckley and his colleagues sent off a proposal and received a grant that would allow them to spend 15 years conducting research in Madagascar. In those years, the group would unveil many dinosaur and crocodile fossils.

“One of these trips, in the late 90s, we were exploring this one area that we hadn’t looked in before when one of the Malagasy students called me over saying that he had found something,” Buckley said. “So, I went running over there. I could see on the back, and it was kind of going into the hill. We cleaned it up and uncovered the back of the skull of what was clearly a crocodile.”

After its discovery, the fossil was wrapped in plaster and shipped to the United States, where Buckley would clean the rock away and expose the rest of the skull. What he would reveal was a short, little crocodile with a pug-nose. This was not Buckley’s only discovery on the fossil. He also determined that the crocodile had been a vegetarian because of its leaf-shaped teeth. This is how the fossil would get its name Simosuchus, which means “pug-nose crocodile” in Greek. Buckley said that this was a “big scientific splash.”

“It’s not every day that you find something that breaks the template,” Buckley said. “[Many] people think of crocodiles and alligators today as living fossils … things that haven’t changed in millions and millions of years. What the Simosuchus showed us was that, in the past, there was all this cool diversity.”

While Buckley deemed this discovery “the coolest thing [he’d] ever find” he has since closed that chapter of his life. Now, a professor at UNA, he accredits what he learned during his time in Madagascar as one of the reasons why he teaches. Madagascar also exposed Buckley to the many issues the country had related to sustainability, recognizing that resource usage was a significant problem. In the years that him and his colleagues had been there, they had watched the forest go from abundance to clear cut.

“All of these unique plants and animals that live in Madagascar were going extinct at an extremely high level because people need the resources to survive,” Buckley said. “So, there’s this real balancing act. How do you preserve biodiversity? How do you preserve culture? How do you allow people to obtain the resources they need to protect, eat, and feed their family? This is when I became interested in sustainability, looking at changes in climate, looking at equity – how do we preserve what we have while these developing countries still have these needs that are impacted by their economic situation?” These questions ultimately led him to transition into teaching about sustainability. In teaching the next generation, Buckley hopes for practical solutions for the future that is ahead.

Buckley said sustainability is not something that is going away. “We have over 7 ½ billion people on this planet that are producing waste, that are using plastics, that are driving and using fossil fuel-based energy,” Buckley said. “We just can’t go on like we’re doing.” Buckley tries to instill still this mindset in his students by raising awareness to these problems so that can impact policy and can let politicians know how important these issues are.

“I’d like to think my teaching makes a difference, and that’s why I do what I do,” Buckley said. “When I hear from students that I’ve had in the past, and they tell me what they’re doing and it does involve what they learn in my courses … that’s always sustaining. That lifts my soul when I hear that.”

Exposing students – science majors or non-science majors – to sustainability and knowing that they are able to take something away from Buckley’s courses is what keeps him going.

“Maybe [a student] sees something on TV or on YouTube that without my class, they would have just flipped through,” Buckley said. “It’s going to be something that rings a bell and maybe they watch a few minutes. That’s what I hope for.” If someone had asked that same young paleontologist where he would be in 20 years, he would have never predicted it would be at UNA. Maybe he would presume that he would be still traveling the world, searching for foreign fossils. And in a way, he still is.

“While I say I moved on from Madagascar crocodiles, I’m still trying to find my niche here in the fossils of Alabama,” Buckley said. “There are enough things here that are still able to be explored and learned, and that’s what I’m starting to work on now – the geological mysteries of Alabama and making it accessible to the community.” Buckley believes that he can play a part in unveiling fossils in the area that many did not know about.

“That’s how life works,” Buckley said. “You end one chapter and open another one, and I’m enjoying the chapter I’m in now.”