CLEVELAND P. HICKMAN, JR. is a zoologist who received his academic training at DePauw University, University of New Hampshire, and University of British Columbia, where he received a Ph.D. in zoology. His early research was in fish physiology. His academic teaching career began at the University of Alberta in Canada, where he taught animal physiology and zoology; he later moved to Washington & Lee University in Virginia. Throughout his teaching career he authored three textbooks of zoology, including the popular Integrated Principles of Zoology, published by McGraw-Hill and now in its 15th edition. It has been translated into Spanish, Italian, German and Portuguese.

After making an unforgettable visit to the Galapagos Islands in 1974, he soon refocused his research on the systematics and distribution of the marine invertebrate fauna of the Galapagos Islands. This led after his retirement from teaching to the publication of four field guides to the echinoderms, crustaceans, molluscs and corals of the Galapagos Islands in the Galapagos Marine Life Series. The field guides to the molluscs and crustaceans were coauthored with Yves Finet and Todd Zimmerman.

YVES FINET has been studying molluscs of the Galapagos Islands since 1982 and first visited the archipelago in 1984. A native of Belgium, he became a civil engineer, then agronomist, at the University of Brussels where he also was granted a PhD in zoology. He specialized in malacology and is now working at the Museum of Natural History of Geneve, Switzerland.

TODD ZIMMERMAN holds a Masters degree from the University of Southwestern Louisiana and Masters and PHD degrees from UCLA. He worked extensively with the Allan Hancock crustacean collections at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County. His research includes crustacean ecology, biogeography and taxonomy, focusing on the island faunas of Cocos and the Galapagos in the eastern Pacific, and the Virgin Islands in the Caribbean.