He has also been a natural historian probably since his first mouthful of dirt, although he did not realize it at the time. Natural history flows through much of what he teaches and as well as his research. Terry is the director of the Lyman Entomological Museum, a collection of three million unique volumes of biodiversity data, each impaled on a pin or floating in a vial. The museum’s research in insect taxonomy helps unravel patterns of ecological structure in arthropod communities in habitats from temperate forests to high arctic tundra, and from human-altered, restored and pristine sites.