Percy M. Butler led a remarkable life – in the process surviving two world wars, publishing over 100 scholarly papers on a wide array of topics, becoming an accomplished artist, and living to the age of 102. Percy’s publishing career began in 1935 and has yet to end with co-authored papers still in the works two years after his death in 2015.
Early in 2016 we began to contact colleagues to gauge their interest in contributing original research papers to a volume that would cover many aspects of Percy’s work as well as to honor him for a long and distinguished career. The response was overwhelming and immediate so we decided to move forward with this project. A great many of the authors involved in this project had interactions with Percy over the years, many having worked very closely with him. All were influenced by his seminal work in dental development and by the breadth of his knowledge and interests.
The volume begins with a remembrance of Percy by one of us (JJH) who knew him well and worked with him for nearly 50 years. After this, the issue is divided into three sections focusing on aspects of biology and systematics that Percy had found most interesting. Section III contains six papers that deal with aspects of dental function and development including studies of tooth wear, dental field evolution, the genetic basis of tooth form and function, and occlusal topography as it relates to diet in living and fossil mammals.
Section IV contains five papers that examine deciduous dentitions and dental eruption patterns within several mammalian groups including primates, perissodactyls, artiodactyls, and proboscideans.
The last and largest section V includes ten papers on faunal and systematic studies and range in taxonomic coverage from cynodonts to humans. Several papers describe new taxa including primates, bats, pantodonts, perissodactyls, and lipotyphlans while another focuses on one of Percy’s favorite groups, elephant shrews, and two others on human evolution from East and South Africa. The geographic coverage is wide as well with works covering North and South America, Europe and Africa.
As with all works such as this we have very many people to thank for their efforts in bringing this volume to reality. First and foremost all of the authors worked very hard and gave of their time to review each other’s papers. We appreciate all of their efforts very much. We also called on many other friends and colleagues to serve as reviewers and we owe them a big thank you for their efforts. Finally we owe a large debt of gratitude to Gareth Dyke who was the calm guiding hand through this process and who let us have our way most of the time.
In the final phase of assembling this volume, lead editor Gregg Gunnell lost a short battle with an aggressive lymphoma that took him in only 22 days. Gregg’s career was all too brief compared to Butler’s, had an impact on the fields of vertebrate paleontology and primate evolution, including the lives of many of us in them, that can hardly be measured. This volume is co-dedicated to him.