Amiyaal Ilany is an Associate Professor at the School of Zoology and the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel Aviv University. He received all his degrees from Tel Aviv University. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS), University of Tennessee, and at the Department of Biology, University of Pennsylvania. He also served as a faculty member at the Faculty of Life Sciences at Bar-Ilan University. He thinks he was born at the wrong time, because 35 million years ago hyraxes the size of rhinos lived in Africa.