As paleobiology graduate students, Jim Schiffbauer and John Huntley shared research projects, laughs and a tiny office at Virginia Tech. A decade later, they’re both MU assistant professors, and … not much has changed. They still collaborate. They still laugh a lot. And they’re still in close proximity, with adjacent (though larger) offices. One addition: star protégé Tara Selly, MS ’15, a doctoral candidate with a penchant for investigating the biology and ecology of the fossil record. Schiffbauer is Selly’s official adviser, and she calls Huntley her “step-adviser.” The three worked together on a project that informed Selly’s first paper and the professors’ first published collaboration: studying the predatory behaviors of trilobites — extinct marine arthropods — as recorded in Southeast Missouri fossils. “Ichnofossil record of selective predation by Cambrian trilobites” was published in Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology.