P David Polly Editor

Jeremy B. Searle is a Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Cornell University, New York. He has studied the evolutionary biology of small mammals, including research into colonisation history, speciation and chromosomal evolution. His Ph.D. was on the chromosomes of common shrew and he founded a series of meeting that met regularly for twenty-one years and stimulated much of the work in this book. P. David Polly is a vertebrate palaeontologist at Indiana University, Bloomington. He studies the evolution of mammals and other vertebrates in the fossil record, including trait-based studies of community response to environmental change, geometric morphometric analysis of evolution and morphology, phylogenetics, biogeography, and speciation on regional and continental geographic scales. Jan Zima is a Senior Scientist at the Institute of Vertebrate Biology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Prague and Professor of Zoology at the Department of Zoology, Univerzita Karlova, Prague. He has studied chromosomal variation in various species of mammals and other vertebrates, and has attempted to imply cytogenetic findings to biodiversity, systematic and phylogenetic issues.