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Natural history curators oversee the worlds libraries of life, and themselves are full of life and colorful characters. As museums evolve from dusty collections to centers of edutainment, curators remain the drivers and innovators, and Curators offers us a behind the scenes tour of some of the world s finest specimens of curators and collections alike. In these pages, readers will get to experience time in the field collecting and identifying, and the magic that happens back at home, as collections are curated, exhibits are mounted, and museum curators engage the public. A renowned curator himself, Lance Grande here shares his own experiences, and drawers of those of colleagues and curators at natural history museums the world over. Curators illuminates the halls of natural history museums and puts on display the personalities that drive these cathedrals of science and discovery. It is a work for all interested in what it is really like to spend days and nights at the museum. "
About the author
Lance Grande has been doing paleontological fieldwork in the Fossil Butte Member of southwestern Wyoming for more than thirty years and is one of the world's foremost authorities on this amazing locality. He is also a curator at the Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago, where he conducts research on fishes, paleontology, geology, and evolutionary biology. He is the award-winning author of more than one hundred books and scientific articles, including
The Lost World of Fossil Lake: Scenes from Deep Time and
Gems and Gemstones: Timeless Natural Beauty of the Mineral World, both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Gems and Gemstones won the 2009 PROSE Award in Earth Sciences, and in 2012 he received the Robert H. Gibbs Award for an Outstanding Body of Published Work in Systematic Ichthyology. He is a Lecturer at the University of Chicago, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Illinois. At the University of Chicago he also serves on the Council of the Graham School, and on the Committee on Evolutionary Biology. He is a board member for the Chicago Council on Science and Technology, and serves on the Executive Steering Committee for
The Encyclopedia of Life.
