Geerat Vermeij

Geerat Vermeij (pronounced Ver-MAY), Ph.D., is Professor of Marine Ecology and Paleoecology at the University of California, Davis, California. Born with glaucoma and completely blind since the age of 3, he has never seen a single creature—living or fossil. He describes in vivid and entertaining prose just how he broke out of the bonds of society as a blind person and into the world of ecology, malacology, and biology.

Geerat Vermeij is probably best known for his work chronicling the arms race among long-extinct molluscs and their predators. By examining and analyzing fossils for evidence of interspecies competition and predation, Vermeij has prompted the field of paleobiology to acknowledge the profound influences creatures have on fashioning each other's evolutionary fates. Vermeij, a native of the Netherlands, has concentrated, especially, on ecological interactions like competition and predation, rather than on environmental factors such as climate change.

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