No Geologist worth anything is permanently bound to a desk or laboratory, but the charming notion that true science can only be based on unbiased observation of nature in the raw is mythology. Creative work, in geology and anywhere else, is interaction and synthesis: half-baked ideas from a bar room, rocks in the field, chains of thought from lonely walks, numbers squeezed from rocks in a laboratory, numbers from a calculator riveted to a desk, fancy equipment usually malfunctioning on expensive ships, cheap equipment in the human cranium, arguments before a road cut.

Examples include the "masculinized genitalia in female hyenas exaptive use of an umbilicus as a brooding chamber by snails the shoulder hump of the giant Irish deer and several key features of human mentality. Marriage and family
Gould was married twice. Technical work on land snails
Most of Gould's empirical research pertained to land snails.

Most of Gould's empirical research was based on the land snail genera Poecilozonites and Cerion. Many of Gould's essays for the magazine Natural History were reprinted in collections such as Ever Since Darwin and The Panda's Thumb. He also contributed to evolutionary developmental biology and has received wide praise for his book Ontogeny and Phylogeny.