George R. McGhee Jr.
Department of Geological Sciences
Wright-Rieman Laboratories
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903
USA correspondence author

George McGhee is Professor of Paleobiology in the Department of Geological Sciences at Rutgers University. He is a past Fellow of the Konrad Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition Research in Vienna, Austria, and he has held research positions at the University of Tübingen (Germany), the Field Museum of Natural History (Chicago), and the American Museum of Natural History (New York City).

McGhee is interested both in the evolution of ecosystems, multi-species assemblages, and in the evolution of morphology in individual organisms. In the past, he has spent a long time researching the causes of the Late Devonian global ecosystem collapse, one of the "Big Five" biodiversity crises in geologic time, and has summarized his thoughts on that event in his 1996 book, The Late Devonian Mass Extinction, published by Columbia University Press. These days, he is busy trying to convince people of the power of the analytical techniques of theoretical morphology in understanding the evolution of organic form (hence this paper). To that end, he has previously written the book Theoretical Morphology: the Concept and Its Applications (also published by Columbia, in 1999) and is at present writing yet another, The Geometry of Evolution: Adaptive Landscapes and Theoretical Morphospaces, to be published by Cambridge University Press in 2007 (the UK Cambridge, not the US one).

He and his wife, Marae, escape to Scotland most every summer, where he enjoys driving on the left-hand side of the road in the Gaidhealtachd.