Tropical Marine Mollusks

Edward J. Petuch was born in Bethesda, Maryland in 1949. Raised in a Navy family, he spent many of his childhood years collecting living and fossil shells in such varied localities as Chesapeake Bay, California, Puerto Rico, and Wisconsin. His early interests in malacology and oceanography eventually led to BA and MS degrees in zoology from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. During his MS thesis research, Petuch concentrated on the molluscan biogeography of West Africa, traveling extensively in the Canary Islands, Western Sahara, Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone, Ivory Coast, and Cameroons. During this time, he also conducted research on the molluscan ecology of both coasts of Mexico and the Great Barrier Reef of Belize. Continuing his education, Petuch studied marine biogeography and malacology under Gilbert Voss and Donald Moore at the Rosenstiel School of Marine and Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Miami, where he received a full scholarship. During this time, his doctoral dissertation research involved intensive field work in Costa Rica, Colombia, Venezuela, Barbados, the Grenadines, and Brazil, where he often went to sea with the local shrimpers for weeks at a time. After receiving his Ph.D. in oceanography in 1980, Petuch was invited to conduct two years of postdoctoral research, funded by the National Science Foundation, with Geerat Vermeij at the University of Maryland. While there, he also held a research associateship with the Department of Paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History, Smithsonian Institution, under the sponsorship of Thomas Waller, and conducted field work in the Plio-Pleistocene fossil beds of Florida and North Carolina and the Miocene fossil beds of Maryland and Virginia. Petuch has also collected and studied living mollusks in Australia, Papua-New Guinea, Fijis, French Polynesia, Japan, the Bahamas, Nicaragua, and Uruguay. This research has led to the publication of over 300 scientific papers and the discovery and description of over 1,200 new species of mollusks and over 90 new genera. His previous 20 books are well-known reference texts in the malacological and paleontological communities, and some of the better known include: Jewels of the Everglades: The Fossil Cowries of Southern Florida (2018), The Living and Fossil Busycon Whelks: Iconic Mollusks of Eastern North America (2015), Molluscan Communities of the Florida Keys and Adjacent Areas: Their Ecology and Biodiversity (2014), Biogeography and Biodiversity of Western Atlantic Mollusks (2013), Molluscan Paleontology of the Chesapeake Miocene (2010), The Geology of the Everglades and Adjacent Areas (2007), Cenozoic Seas: The View from Eastern North America (2004), and Cone Shells of the Okeechobean Sea (2015). Currently, Petuch is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Geosciences, Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, Florida where, for thirty years, he taught undergraduate classes in oceanography, paleontology, and physical geology, and graduate classes in paleoecology and paleoceanography. He currently resides in Jupiter, Florida, with his wife Linda, where they both enjoy visits from their three children and their families.