Ralph Stearley has broad interests in the history of Earth and its life. At Calvin, he teaches historical geology, paleontology, oceanography, and stratigraphy, as well as participating in teaching introductory geology. He has also taught introductory geology and field-based biology during the summer to students at the Au Sable Institute for Environmental Studies (at its Michigan and Puget Sound campuses), for Wheaton College's field station in the Black Hills of South Dakota, and Calvin's May program in southwest Montana. He received his B.A. from the University of Missouri, his M.S. from the University of Utah, and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. During 1991-92, he was a post-doctoral researcher at the Illinois State Museum. Dr. Stearley's past research has included studies of rock-boring marine invertebrates in the intertidal zone of the Gulf of California in Sonora, Mexico; field collection of Miocene and Pliocene fossil fishes in the Snake River Plain of Idaho; anatomy and systematics of salmonid fishes; analysis of fish remains from archaeological sites in New Mexico and west Michigan; and assisting in developing a computerized database of Pleistocene mammalian fossil sites for North America. During the summer of 1999 he directed the excavation of the Ada Bible Church Mastodon in Cascade, Michigan by a crew of Calvin College geology students and community volunteers. Dr. Stearley has authored or co-authored technical papers for Palaios; Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology and Palaeoecology; Earth and Planetary Science Letters; as well as book chapters and a popular article on Michigan fossils in the journal Rocks and Minerals. In 1994, the American Fisheries Society awarded Ralph Stearley and co-author Gerald Smith (University of Michigan) its Best Paper award for their article on salmonid evolution and systematics published in the Transactions of the American Fisheries Society (1993). September 2008 saw the publication of The Bible, Rocks and Time, a Christian defense of the great antiquity of Earth, written in collaboration with Calvin emeritus professor Davis Young.