Platnick-Norman I

Norman I. Platnick is the Peter J. Solomon Family Curator Emeritus of Spiders at the American Museum of Natural History, where he curated the world’s largest collection of spiders. A PhD recipient from Harvard University, Platnick has described more than 1,800 species of spider, making him the second most prolific arachnologist in history. He created the World Spider Catalog, an online database that provides people around the globe with ready access to all the taxonomic literature on more than 48,000 species, a resource that is unmatched for any other group of organisms.