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!