J. David Archibald

J. David Archibald is Professor Emeritus of Biology, San Diego State University [http://www.bio.sdsu.edu/faculty/archibald.html/]. Born in 1950, Lawrence, Kansas, he is an American paleobiologist. He received his BSc (Magna cum Laude) from Kent State University, 1972 and his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, 1977. His dissertation dealt with biotic change, notably of mammals across the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary in eastern Montana. From 1977 through 1983 he was J. Willard Gibbs Postdoctoral Fellow in Geology and then Assistant Professor in Biology at Yale University. He declined promotion to Associate Professor to return to California, where he has been since 1983. In May, 2011 he became Professor and Curator Emeritus of Biology. His fieldwork has taken him to the American West innumerable times and to Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Uzbekistan 13 times. He lectures in the U.S and overseas. He has written over 150 articles, essays, and reviews on the systematics and evolution of early mammals, biostratigraphy, faunal analysis, extinction, and evolutionary history, which have appeared in many journals including Nature and Science. His books include: A Study of Mammalia and Geology Across the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary in Garfield County, Montana (1982, University of California Press), Dinosaur Extinction and the End of an Era: What the Fossils Say (1996, Columbia University Press), The Rise Of Placental Mammals: Origins And Relationships Of The Major Extant Clades (2005, edited with Ken Rose), Extinction and Radiation: How the Fall of the Dinosaurs Led to the Rise of the Mammals (2011 - both, Johns Hopkins University Press), Grzimek's Animal Life Encyclopedia: Extinct Life, 2 Volume Set (2013, Gale, edited with Norm MacLeod and Philip Levin), and Aristotle's Ladder, Darwin's Tree: The Evolution of Visual Metaphors for Biological Order (2014, Columbia University Press). This most recent book deals with how iconography of especially ladders and trees from Aristotle though DNA has shaped the perception of our place in nature. His work has been supported by some 24 grants from various organizations, most notably the he National Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society. Among his honors are associations with four national and international museums, a Gibbs Fellowship at Yale, a Paleontology Society Distinguished Lecturership, a Fulbright Scholarship in Russia, the Langston Distinguished Lectureship at UT Austin, and a 2007 election as Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He taught mammalogy, macroevolution, biogeography, and vertebrate evolution for over 30 years, and has mentored some 30 graduate students and hundreds of undergraduates in his lab and the field.