ABSTRACT:
The past decade has produced an amazingly robust picture for the universe we live in. This picture predicts that structure forms hierarchically, i.e., small objects collapse at early times and grow via mergers and gravity. It is thus commonly thought that massive galaxies in the local universe are the end result of numerous mergers between smaller progenitor galaxies. It is unclear, however, how this view meshes with observations that show that massive galaxies with quenched star formation were relatively common even above z=2. These "early early-type" galaxies exhibit properties strikingly different from those of local ellipticals, with very small radii, high velocity dispersions for their masses, and large ellipticities. In this talk I will argue for a merger-driven formation scenario for these galaxies, and try to tie this evolutionary sequence to several other classes of high redshift objects.