Matthew Bettelheim

Matthew Bettelheim is a wildlife biologist, science writer, and natural historian based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Although he regularly loses himself in the natural history section of any museum or bookstore he happens upon, Matthew still finds time as a journalist to write for such media outlets as Bay Nature, Earth Island Journal, Berkeley Science Review, Bibliotheca Herpetologica, and Faultline on everything from the historical portrayal of a Turkish tortoise in a world-famous painting to woolly mammoth rubbing rocks along the California coast.

As a wildlife biologist with Nomad Ecological Consulting, he has spent an inordinate amount of time studying two of California’s scarcer species, the western pond turtle and the silvery legless lizard (no legs does not a snake make…). When he isn’t chasing his year-old toddler Noah Pardee around the house (or retrieving cell phones, sticks, and miscellaneous household items from the black hole that is his son’s mouth), he and his wife Sarah haunt used bookstores, retrieve (more) things from their son’s mouth, and make for the hills to photograph and biologize.