Gregory Donald Edgecombe FRS is a merit researcher in the department of Earth Sciences at the Natural History Museum, London. He is a leading figure in understanding the evolution of arthropods, their position in animal evolution and the integration of fossil data into analyses of animal phylogeny. As a palaeontologist, he is also an authority on the systematics of centipedes – and a morphologist whose work contributes to the growth and methods of analysis of molecular datasets for inferring evolutionary relationships.