Niles Eldredge is a Curator in the Department of Invertebrates, the American Museum of Natural History, New York. Among his recent books are The Miner's Canary: Unraveling the Mysteries of Extinctionand Fossils: The Evolution and Extinction of Species.. He has coauthored and edited many books, including Phylogenetic Analysis and Paleontology, Phylogenetic Patterns and the Evolutionary Process, The Myths of Human Evolution, and the Natural History Reader on Evolution,published by Columbia University Press.