Niles Eldredge

Niles Eldredge was born on 25 August 1943 in New York City. He studied at Columbia University, graduating in 1965 and completing a PhD in geology in 1969 under the paleontologist Norman Newell, and joined the American Museum of Natural History as a curator that same year, remaining there for his career. His research specialty is the evolution of Phacopida trilobites, an extinct group of marine arthropods, whose fossil record he studied for long stretches with almost no gradual change between sudden appearances of new forms. Working from that pattern together with Stephen Jay Gould, whom he had known since graduate school, Eldredge co-authored the 1972 paper that proposed punctuated equilibrium, building on the biologist Ernst Mayr's existing model of geographic speciation to argue that most evolutionary change is concentrated in relatively brief speciation events rather than spread evenly across a lineage's history.