Terry L. Erwin: She Had a Black Eye and in Her Arm She Held a Skunk

Terry L. Erwin is Curator of Coleoptera at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C. and editor-in-chief of ZooKeys. He generated significant controversy in 1982—which continues to this day—when he published an estimate of 30 million species on Earth, which was substantially more than the nearly one million described species. He was born 1 December 1940 in St. Helena, California and spent his youth trout fishing with his maternal grandfather in the High Sierra near Lake Tahoe. As a teenager, with prodding from his father, he built hot rod cars and was a founding member and later President of the California Conquistadores, a hot rod club in the San Francisco Bay area. Erwin earned his B.S. (1964, Biology) and M.A. (1966, Biology) degrees from San Jose State College. With a desire to learn from the three greatest living carabidologists, he first obtained a Ph.D. (1969, Entomology) from University of Alberta under the direction of George Ball. This was followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology ZooKeys 500: 9–24 (2015)