Menno Schilthuizen


Menno Schilthuizen 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, The Netherlands.
He has published numerous articles about evolution and ecology and four popular science books. 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 latest book, , is on "urban evolution", evolutionary adaptation in cities, and has appeared in 2018 in English, and also in Chinese, Dutch, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish.
Besides his academic positions, Schilthuizen works as an independent science communicator via his own company, . Recently, together with biospeleologist Iva Njunjić, he has begun the organisation , 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 Groningen University. He now holds a professorship in Character Evolution and Biodiversity at Leiden University.

Books