Forest J. Gahn received a PhD in geology from the University of Michigan (2004) and served as a research fellow at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Forest is an invertebrate paleontologist who specializes in the evolutionary ecology of marine life, especially echinoderms. His research has been published in Integrative and Comparative Biology, Paleobiology, PNAS, Science, and featured in National Geographic, MSNBC, Science News, and Smithsonian magazine. He is currently working as a professor of geology at Brigham Young University—Idaho.