His discoveries included a transitional creature with characteristics of both fish and land animals, Tiktaalik roseae, and one of the earliest known frogs, Prosalirus bitis.

After arriving to Yale in 1964 to continue his studies in geology, Jenkins took a trip to Nairobi where he is said to have taken his first interest in live animal research: "At the time, black rhinos in the bush were as thick as rats in a dump.

I barely made it back to my Morris Minor in time, lost a lens cap on the way, but became, as a result of those three weeks, as much intrigued by living vertebrates as by their extinct relatives.

[7] His trips were subsidized by an anonymous benefactor named Rose[2] and were so strenuous that a colleague of 30 years, Neil Shubin, called them "pure Calvinist".

[6] In 1981 he discovered a pile of four frog-like skeletons in the Arizona desert, which initially looked like road kill, and with Neil Shubin he studied the fossils for 14 years.

When lecturing on the subject of gait, he would illustrate this by walking on a peg leg as the character Captain Ahab from Herman Melville's Moby Dick.

[6] On expeditions he dressed in the dashing style of Indiana Jones, donning a Czechoslovak rabbit fur hat and carrying a gun and a flask of vodka.