Curator, Division of Paleontology, and Curator of the Irma and Paul Milstein Hall of Ocean Life

Neil H. Landman. Denis Finnin / AMNH

Neil H. Landman is a specialist on living and fossil mollusks. His main focus is the class of mollusks known as cephalopods, which include the giant squid, the pearly nautilus, and their extinct relatives, the ammonites. He has studied these animals on expeditions to the southwest Pacific, Morocco, and Montana. Currently he is describing the cephalopods that lived in the ocean that covered parts of North America at the very end of the Cretaceous period. He is also studying the systematics of the nautilus in New Caledonia as part of a larger study on the nautilus evolution in the South Pacific. Dr. Landman received a B.S. in mathematics from the Polytechnic Institute of New York, an M.S. in Earth sciences from Adelphi University, and M.Phil. and Ph.D. degrees in geology from Yale University in 1982. He joined the Museum in 1982 as Assistant Curator and was named Curator in 1993. He served as chair of the Museum's Department of Invertebrates from 1992 to 1999, and is currently an adjunct professor at CUNY. Dr. Landman was lead curator for the exhibition Pearls (2001-2002) and coauthored Pearls: A Natural History (American Museum of Natural History, The Field Museum, and Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2001). Dr. Landman has also coedited and contributed to two scholarly books: Nautilus: The Biology and Paleobiology of a Living Fossil (Plenum Press, New York, 1987) and Ammonoid Paleobiology (Plenum Press, New York, 1996).