Gustafson’s vindication came in stages.

The 2011 Science paper, which put the Waters team’s name on the analysis, built on Gustafson’s decades of advocacy for the site.

The 2023 Science Advances paper completed the vindication.

But the intellectual labor of maintaining the site’s integrity and making the initial argument — doing the work that made all of the later analysis possible — was Gustafson’s.

The Manis mastodon would not be in a laboratory today if Gustafson had not recognized what he found, excavated it carefully, preserved the rib, and continued to argue for its significance through years of skepticism.

That recognition and that persistence deserve to be part of the story.