Matt Friedman wants to know why fishes are the way they are, and why they inhabit the places they do

Professor Matt Friedman, when relaying how his colleagues described him, said with a laugh: “I’m the guy who studies weird fishes.” His favorite fish changes day to day, but on this day, it was the “very obscure” Tegeolepis—a meter-long, ray-finned, open-ocean predatory fish from the Devonian. 

It was weird fishes like Tegeolepis that sparked Friedman’s interest in paleontology. 

“Museums have a special place for me,” Friedman said. “Growing up near Cleveland, the museum had an amazing menagerie of ancient fishes—giant armored placoderms, sharks preserved with soft tissues, stuff that looked very alien. And I thought they were all cool, in part because they’re so different from what’s around today.”

As a paleontologist, Friedman is interested in using the evolution, biodiversity, and biogeography of fish of the past to better understand the fishes of the present—and of the future, in their responses to climate change. His research has migrated up and down the stratigraphic column and around the globe. And his lab is a busy place these days with a slew of projects led (he’s quick to specify) by his students.

These days, Friedman is particularly intrigued by fossils with soft tissue preserved, which painstaking scanning efforts have revealed. “In doing this non-destructive sampling, we’ve found a whole new kind of information that we’ve not really had in fishes before,” Friedman said. “Soft tissues are providing us with powerful new lines of evidence about anatomy, which in turn tells us about animals’ ecologies.”
Using soft body parts to understand ancient fishes’ relationships with their environment in turn sheds light on what drove biodiversity in the past. That new information is particularly important for the tropics, where today fish have the greatest biodiversity, but the fossil record is lacking, particularly in the Cenozoic. 
That dearth of fossils resulting in “really poor understanding” of tropical diversity is due in part to the Northern Hemisphere bias many fossil collections have, with most samples coming from North America and Europe, Friedman said. With work and local collaborators in places such as Egypt and Pakistan, which had “remarkable” biodiversity during the Cenozoic, he and his students are working to fill in those critical spatial gaps.

It’s a bias he’s keenly aware of in his role as director and curator of the Museum of Paleontology at the University of Michigan. 

“Paleontology, and our fossil records, are historically built upon fossils from Europe and North America, which means we’ve been looking at an incomplete record, through a distorted lens,” Friedman said. “So it’s really important to recognize that, and to collaborate with and support our colleagues around the globe who are working to address that imbalance. Having these new perspectives will fundamentally change our understanding of the patterns we see in the fossil record.”