They had sifted through the forest floor’s leaves and dirt for days, looking for a tiny type of daddy longlegs native to New Zealand, but had little more than dirty hands to show for it.
Gonzalo Giribet, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, managed to remain upbeat, but with each passing day the sick feeling in doctoral student Sarah Boyer’s stomach grew. The two had traveled halfway around the world looking for the daddy longlegs as part of Boyer’s dissertation.
No daddy longlegs, no dissertation.
