Ian Tattersall is Curator Emeritus in the Division of Anthropology of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Trained in archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge, and in geology and vertebrate paleontology at Yale, Ian has concentrated his research since the 1960s in two main areas: the analysis of the human fossil record and its integration with evolutionary theory, and the study of the ecology and systematics of the lemurs of Madagascar. He has carried out both primatological and paleontological fieldwork in countries as diverse as Madagascar, Vietnam, Surinam, Yemen and Mauritius. In collaboration with Jeffrey Schwartz, Ian has recently completed three volumes of The Hominid Fossil Record, a documentation in standardized descriptive and illustrative format of a large proportion of the most significant fossils that tell the human evolutionary story. Ian is also a prominent interpreter of human paleontology to the public, with several trade books to his credit, among them Masters of the Planet (2012), Race? Debunking a Scientific Myth (2011, with Rob DeSalle), The World from Beginnings to 4000 BCE (2008), Becoming Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness (1998) and The Fossil Trail: How We Know What We Think We Know About Human Evolution (1995, 2nd ed. 2009), as well as many articles in Scientific American and Natural History, and the co-editorship of the definitive Encyclopedia of Human Evolution and Prehistory. He lectures widely, and, as curator, has also been responsible for several major exhibits at the American Museum of Natural History, including Ancestors: Four Million Years of Humanity (1984); Dark Caves, Bright Visions: Life In Ice Age Europe (1986); Madagascar: Island of the Ancestors (1989); The First Europeans: Treasures from the Hills of Atapuerca (2003); and the highly acclaimed Hall of Human Biology and Evolution (1993) and its successor Hall of Human Origins (2007).