Leonard Krishtalka
NCSE congratulates Leonard Krishtalka for becoming the namesake of Nyctitherium krishtalkai, "a fossilized 50-million-year-old insect-eating mammal, about the size of a shrew or small hedgehog," according to a press release issued on October 28, 2013, by the University of Kansas. Richard Stucky, curator of Paleoecology and Evolution at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science (and member of NCSE's Advisory Council), was quoted as saying, "I named it after Krishtalka because of his mentoring in the early stages of my career and for his research on the group of fossil mammals to which it belongs."
Krishtalka himself commented in the press release, "I'm very honored to have a new species discovered by science named for me." A member of NCSE, Krishtalka is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and director of the Biodiversity Institute at the University of Kansas. He was active in resisting the attempts of creationists to compromise the integrity of Kansas's state science standards in 1998 and again in 2005. Krishtalka is generally credited with the memorable description of "intelligent design" as "creationism in a cheap tuxedo."