Stefan
Bengtson, Emeritus Editor
Department of Palaeozoology, Swedish Museum of Natural History, Box 50007,
SE-104 05 Stockholm, Sweden.
Stefan
was born in northernmost Sweden. Having finished school he corrected the
mistake and nowadays returns to the Arctic only for the occasional frolic
along Siberian rivers. He spent the early part of his career at Uppsala
University, with two year-long sabbaticals at the University of
California, Los Angeles. In 1995, he parted from the Uppsala University on
friendly terms and resettled to the Swedish Museum of Natural History in
Stockholm.
His main research interests are the origin
and early evolution of animals. This has focused him on the late
Neoproterozoic-Cambrian interval of Earth history and taken him to nice
places like Siberia, China and Australia. Mostly he has been working with
early skeletal fossils of various description, he has taken up
palaeoembryology as a means of extracting new kinds of information on
early animals, and recently he has ventured (some say blundered) into the
mined territory of uncomfortably early (1.2 Ga or more) trace-like fossils
discovered by West Australian colleagues.
Stefan has been engaged in scientific
publishing for a longer time than is probably healthy; since 1971 he has
been continuously active as an editor of something. Since the mid 1980s he
has been working with electronic publishing methods as a means of
increasing quality and cutting costs by shortcutting the traditional
production methods.
From 1992 to 1999 Stefan produced the
journal Lethaia and its associated monograph series Fossils and Strata for
the Lethaia Foundation and Scandinavian University Press. He left those
commissions in 1999 and promised himself to stay out of scientific
publishing for a while and spend more time on his research projects. The
while lasted almost ten days, after which trying period he succumbed to
the temptation to join the editorial crew of Palaeontologia Electronica,
thus continuing his subversive work to make scientific information freely
available to scientists.
Stefan likes music (choral stuff, operas,
that kind of thing) and cooking, sometimes even eating the result. He
doesn’t know which is his favourite colour. He is married to a
palaeontologist, Christina Franzén, and they have two children who
between themselves agree on one thing only: fossils suck!
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