Fund members

The Wallace Memorial Fund has three permanent members. They are:

Mini Biography of George:

Dr George Beccaloni is an zoologist, evolutionary biologist and science historian, who worked at London’s Natural History Museum (NHM) as an entomologist and curator for more than 20 years. George has studied Wallace's life and work for c. 20 years and is one of three co-executors of Wallace’s Literary Estate, which owns the copyright of Wallace's unpublished writings. George founded the Wallace Memorial Fund in 1999, and is the founder and Director of the Wallace Correspondence Project. In 2002 George played a key role in helping the NHM acquire the World’s largest collection of Wallace-related manuscripts from Wallace’s descendants. George has published a number of articles about Wallace and co-edited the book Natural Selection and Beyond: The Intellectual Legacy of Alfred Russel Wallace with Charles Smith. He was the Historical Consultant for Bill Bailey's Jungle Hero, an award winning two-part BBC series about Wallace. In the past George has worked on the evolution of mimicry, macroecological patterns in butterfly-hostplant relationships, and novel methods to quantify the diet breadths of phytophagous insects. He created the online databases Wallace Letters Online (now replaced by EPSILON's Wallace Collection), the Cockroach Species File, and the Global Lepidoptera Names Index (LepIndex), and has published five books. During his PhD, George spent several months doing fieldwork 'in the style of' Wallace: collecting butterflies and living in a tiny wooden hut without electricity or running water in the Amazonian rainforest of Ecuador, South America. To see George's CV click HERE.

George in doorway of a replica of Wallace's tiny hut near Yenbeser village, Gam Island, Indonesia in 2018. Copyright Karsten Otte.