Darwin

Niles Eldredge
Curator, Division of Paleontology and Curator, Darwin
American Museum of Natural History, New York

Niles Eldredge has been a paleontologist on the curatorial staff of the American Museum of Natural History since 1969. His specialty is the evolution of trilobites—a group of extinct arthropods that lived between 535 and 245 million years ago.

Eldredge’s main professional passion is evolution. Throughout his career, he has used repeated patterns in the history of life to refine ideas on how the evolutionary process actually works. The theory of “punctuated equilibria,” developed with Stephen Jay Gould in 1972, was an early milestone. Eldredge went on to develop a hierarchical vision of evolutionary and ecological systems, and in his book The Pattern of Evolution (1999) he has developed a comprehensive theory (the “sloshing bucket”) that specifies in detail how environmental change governs the evolutionary process.

Concerned with the rapid destruction of many of the world’s habitats and species, Eldredge was Curator-in-Chief of the American Museum’s Hall of Biodiversity (May 1998), and has written several books on the subject—most recently Life in the Balance (1998). He has also combated the creationist movement through lectures, articles and books—including The Triumph of Evolution…And the Failure of Creationism (2000).

Eldredge is the Curator responsible for the content of the major exhibition Darwin. His book Darwin: Discovering the Tree of Life (2005) accompanies the exhibition.

Olivier Rieppel, PhD
Geology Department Chair
Curator, Fossil Amphibians and Reptiles
The Field Museum, Chicago

Olivier Rieppel has been a geology curator at The Field Museum in Chicago since 1990. He researches the origin of snakes through a scientific collaboration that integrates paleontology, comparative morphology and molecular systematics. The origin of snakes is a longstanding problem in the evolution of reptiles that still awaits a satisfactory resolution. The study of the origin of snakes is now embedded in a broad-scale investigation of the phylogenetic relationships of squamate reptiles as part of the Tree of Life program sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

Rieppel has also pursued the global revision of Triassic stem-group Sauropterygia, marine reptiles that later gave rise to the more widely known plesiosaurs, pliosaurs and elasmosaurs of the Jurassic and Cretaceous. This work provided the basis for the ongoing collaborative research program with faculty and students of the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing, focusing on new collections of Triassic marine reptiles from Guizhou Province in southern China. The Triassic record of marine reptiles is rich and diverse, and allows the study of broad evolutionary patterns as originally terrestrial lineages adapted to marine habitats.

“Researching the evolution of various reptile lineages and reconstructing their phylogenetic past raises a number of theoretical and methodological issues that require philosophical analysis,” Rieppel says. “I take an active interest in the history and philosophy of comparative biology.”

Rieppel served as among the collaborating curators who provided input into the Darwin exhibition.

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