Cliff Tabin is George Jacob and Jacqueline Hazel Leder Professor and Chairman of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School. His lab aims to understand the genetic control of morphogenesis during embryonic development and its change over evolutionary time. We met Cliff at the Pan-American Society for Evolutionary Developmental Biology's second biennial meeting, held in Calgary in August 2017, and heard about how he got into development, how a long-standing interest in the limb has been complemented by ventures into new models and why he thinks we are in a golden age for evo-devo.