Menno Schilthuizen

Menno Schilthuizen (born 1965, Vlaardingen) is a Dutch evolutionary biologist, ecologist, and permanent research scientist at Naturalis Biodiversity Center in Leiden and a professor of evolution and biodiversity at Leiden University.

He has published numerous articles about evolution and ecology and five popular science books.Emma Marris (2008) ''No species is an island'', ''Nature'' 455, 1178-1179 (30 October 2008) is a review of ''The Loom of Life''. In particular, his studies have concerned land snails and beetles. His ''Nature's Nether Regions'', on the evolution of genitalia, was published by Penguin in May 2014. Translations have appeared in Dutch, German, Chinese, Greek, Japanese, French and Italian. His book, ''Darwin Comes to Town'', is on "urban evolution", evolutionary adaptation in cities, and has appeared in 2018 in English (with Quercus Kand Picador SA, and also in Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish. French and Turkish translations are in preparation.

Besides his academic positions, Schilthuizen works as an independent science communicator via his own company, Studio Schilthuizen. Recently, together with biospeleologist Iva Njunjić, he has begun the organisation Taxon Expeditions (and its nonprofit, Taxon Foundation), which organise field courses for citizen scientists to Borneo, Montenegro, Panama and other wild places, but also to urban centres like Amsterdam, and allows non-biologists to be involved in the discovery and naming of new species.

Education and career

Menno Schilthuizen graduated from and received his PhD at Leiden University. From 1995 to 2000 he worked at Wageningen University. From 2000 to 2006 he worked at the Institute for Tropical Biology and Conservation in Sabah, Malaysian Borneo, where he studied land snail ecology and evolution in tropical forests, caves, and limestone habitats. In January 2007 he became deputy director of research at Naturalis Museum, Leiden. He stayed at this post for one and a half years, and then became permanent research scientist there. From 2007 to 2012, he was honorary professor of insect biodiversity at University of Groningen. He now holds a professorship in Character Evolution and Biodiversity at Leiden University.

Books

* ''Frogs Flies & Dandelions: The Making of Species'', 2002. Oxford University Press. 254 pages.
* ''The Loom of Life: Unravelling Ecosystems'', 2008. Springer. 168 pages.
* ''Nature's Nether Regions: What the Sex Lives of Bugs, Birds, and Beasts Tell Us About Evolution, Biodiversity, and Ourselves''. 2014. Viking / Penguin. 256 pages.
* ''Darwin Comes to Town'', 2018. Quercus Books
* ''Wie Wat Bewaart'', 2020. Unieboek Het Spectrum. (in Dutch, with Freek Vonk)

Selected articles

* Schilthuizen et al., 2020
''Craspedotropis gretathunbergae'', a new species of Cyclophoridae (Gastropoda: Caenogastropoda), discovered and described on a field course to Kuala Belalong rainforest, Brunei
''Biodiversity Data Journal'', 8: e47484.
* Kerstes, N.A.G., T. Breeschoten, V. Kalkman & M. Schilthuizen, 2019
Snail shell colour evolution in urban heat islands detected via citizen science
''Communications Biology'', 2: 264.
* Merckx et al., 2015
Evolution and endemism on a young tropical mountain
Nature, 524: 347-350.
* Schilthuizen, M., 2005. 'On the origin of reproductive isolation'. ''BioEssays'', 27: 669-670.
* Schilthuizen, M., 2000. 'Dualism and conflicts in understanding speciation'. ''BioEssays'', 22: 1134-1141.

References

External links

Homepage of Studio Schilthuizen

Personal page at Naturalis

Homepage of Taxon Expeditions

Author page at Amazon

Homepage of Taxon Foundation

{{DEFAULTSORT:Schilthuizen, Menno
1965 births
Living people
Dutch biologists
Dutch malacologists
Dutch non-fiction writers
Evolutionary biologists
Leiden University alumni
Academic staff of Leiden University
People from Vlaardingen
Academic staff of the University of Groningen