User:Akreevich/William A. Shear

William A. Shear (b. 1942) is an American zoologist and paleontologist best known as a specialist in the evolution of early land animals, especially arthropods. He has described several Silurian and Devonian faunas and has theorized about the ways in which early terrestrial ecosystems may have evolved. He is also well-known for his taxonomic work on millipedes, opiliones (harvestmen) and other myriapods and arachnids.

Shear was born in Coudersport, Pennsylvania, and majored in Biology (graduated 1963) at the College of Wooster, Wooster, Ohio, where his mentor was Andrew A. Weaver. He earned a MS degree at the University of New Mexico in 1965, and then taught for two years at Concord College, Athens, West Virginia. He finished his PhD degree at Harvard University's Museum of Comparative Zoology, under Herbert W. Levi, in 1971, then returned to Concord. After one year at the University of Florida, he took a position at Hampden-Sydney College in 1974, where he is now Trinkle Distinguished Professor of Biology.

Shear's earliest research was in spider taxonomy; he published a revision of the small spider family Oecobiidae. However, he switched to millipedes for his dissertation work. This was later published as a revision and reclassification of the Order Chordeumatida in the New World. He has continued to work on various millipede groups to the present day and has discovered and named nearly 300 species, genera, families and even orders in or related to the group. Meanwhile, he co-authored and edited a book, Spiders: Webs, Behavior and Evolution, published in 1980 by Stanford University Press.

In 1980, Shear encountered the Scottish paleontologist W. D. Ian Rolfe, and through Rolfe came to lead a group of paleozoologists and paleobotanists studying the Gilboa Ecosystem, a fossil lágerstatte that had been discovered by Patricia Bonamo and Douglas Grierson in the mid-1970s. From work on this, the earliest preserved ecosystem in North America including animals, he developed the theory that the earliest land animals were detritivores and predators, not herbivores, and that herbivory was a late development in both insects and vertebrates. The theory was elaborated further in collaboration with Paul Selden, and Shear and Selden continue to work together on fossil arthropods of the Paleozoic Era.

In addition to serving on the editorial boards of several jounals, Shear is an Associate Editor of the electronic megajournal Zootaxa. He co-edited a book for Zootaxa commemorating the 300th anniversary of the birth of Linnaeus, Linnaeus 300: Progress in Invertebrate Taxonomy.

Shear is also the author of a popular garden book, The Gardener's Iris Book. His interest in traditional martial arts has led him to a fourth-degree blackbelt (yandan) rank in Okinawan Shorin-ryu. Competing in national tournaments, he has been a gold and a silver medalist for several years in the Amatuer Athletic Union program, as well as the Karate Federation of the United States. He is married (1980) to Noelle Prince, a somatic educator, and they have a son, Justin Shear (b. 1987).