Rich Lane is probably best known to North American geologists for his distinguished career at the NSF (National Science Foundation), but he also had an outstanding international reputation as a conodont taxonomist, stratigrapher, and administrator during his 28-year employment with Amoco Production Company in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Houston, Texas. After a childhood in Danville, Illinois, Rich graduated from the University of Illinois with a BS degree in geology (1964), followed by MS (1966) and PhD (1969) degrees at the University of Iowa. His graduate work concentrated on the systematics and zonation of Late Mississippian–Early Pennsylvanian conodonts in the type Morrowan region of Arkansas and Oklahoma (Lane and Straka 1974). Charlie Collinson introduced Rich to the conodonts during his undergraduate days as a research assistant at the Illinois State Geological Survey, and with the encouragement of Brian Glenister and Gil Klapper, his thesis advisors at Iowa, he interned at the Amoco (then Pan American Petroleum) Tulsa Research Center during summers in the late 60s. Upon receiving his PhD, Rich accepted an appointment in Tulsa as a Research Scientist specializing in conodont studies, a position that gave him the opportunity to investigate diverse geological problems worldwide, leading to more than 100 published articles, abstracts for oral presentations, and edited volumes, as well as an even greater number of internal Amoco research reports and technical memoranda.