Ira Pastor, ideaXme life sciences ambassador and founder of Bioquark interviews Matthew Richardson, Canadian author of “Threatened and Recently extinct Vertebrates of the World”, primatologist and conservationist.
“My forthcoming book, Threatened and Recently-extinct Vertebrates of the World, required me to assess and place some 15,000 species and subspecies within an updated biogeographic framework. I also had to coin common names for more than 5,000 of them; figure out an entirely new system of ecoregions based on elevation to nest within my “realms and regions.” find a way to standardize language across the globe in a way that would be mostly acceptable to everyone; and somehow make it interesting for the reader. It is twice the length of “War and Peace.” I’ve gone through three publishers, it took me ten years to write, and I’ve received zero funding in the process” Matthew Richardson.
Ira Pastor comments:
Matthew began his professional career as a writer of historical non-fiction, although for the past several years he has mainly worked on academic projects related to wildlife conservation.
In 2001 he published “The Royal Book of Lists: An Irreverent Romp Through Royal History from Alfred the Great to Prince William.”
For much of the next decade he worked as a primatologist and taxonomist for the U.S.-based NGO Conservation International, co-authoring various books and academic papers. Notable among these were Lemurs of Madagascar (book) and the massive primate volume to the Handbook of the Mammals of the World series (for which he also produced all the maps).
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