Terry L. Erwin is Curator of Coleoptera at the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of Natural History, in Washington, D.C. and editor-in-chief of ZooKeys. He generated significant controversy in 1982—which continues to this day—when he published an estimate of 30 million species on Earth, which was substantially more than the nearly one million described species. He was born 1 December 1940 in St. Helena, California and spent his youth trout fishing with his maternal grandfather in the High Sierra near Lake Tahoe. As a teenager, with prodding from his father, he built hot rod cars and was a founding member and later President of the California Conquistadores, a hot rod club in the San Francisco Bay area. Erwin earned his B.S. (1964, Biology) and M.A. (1966, Biology) degrees from San Jose State College. With a desire to learn from the three greatest living carabidologists, he first obtained a Ph.D. (1969, Entomology) from University of Alberta under the direction of George Ball. This was followed by a post-doctoral fellowship at Harvard University’s Museum of Comparative Zoology with Philip J. Darlington, Jr. During that year, a position opened at the (then) United States National Museum in the Department of Entomology, which he accepted, but two months after taking the job, he departed for a year-long sabbatical at Lund University in Sweden, where he completed the carabidology “trifecta” under the mentorship of Carl H. Lindroth. While in Sweden, the Chairman of Entomology at the USNM changed from Karl Krombien to Paul D. Hurd, who saw on his desk a proposal left by Terry to study California carabid beetles. Learning that grant money was available for research in Central America, Hurd crossed out “California” and wrote in “Panama.” Terry returned to Washington in 1971, as the second coleopterist within the USNM, and was greatly surprised to find that his proposal had been changed, funding had been secured, and he was scheduled for the next flight to the Canal Zone. Thus began a lifetime career on studies of insect biodiversity in neotropical forests.