Alfred L. Gardner

Alfred Lunt Gardner (born November 10, 1937 in Salem , Massachusetts ) is an American Mammaloge .

Life

Gardner is the son of Waldo J. and Ruth L. Gardner. He has a twin brother. He spent his early childhood through third grade in Salem on Gallows Hill. In 1947 he and his family moved to a farm in North Andover , Massachusetts. In 1949 he began to devote himself seriously to hunting and trapping , selling his first fur as a freshman at Danvers High School in Danvers , Massachusetts. In 1953 he moved to Tucson , Arizona , where he initially intended to leave high school and work in a supermarket instead . However, since his father asked for his paycheck every week, he considered the benefits of an education and went to Tucson Senior High School, which he graduated in June 1955. In March 1955 he was drafted into the United States Army. He was the 24th Tank Battalion , 96th Infantry Division , stationed went through in June 1955, the basic training in Fort Ord , California , completed in August a tank summer camp at Camp Irwin, California and enrolled in September, 1955 to the University of Arizona for a Study in the field of wildlife management .

In the fall of 1957, there was a change of priority after he took a course in mammalogy and learned to catch bats and rats and to make museum specimens. The following spring he worked as a welder. On an excursion, however, he discovered a bat colony , which led to active participation in a bat ringing program under the direction of E. Lendell Cockrum . In the spring of 1959, he worked at night as a welder and was a student by day until, in June 1959, he was given the opportunity to go on collecting excursions to Mexico , from where he brought back a large number of mammal samples, especially bats. In 1961 he received a Bachelor of Science degree from the University of Arizona. After another year of collecting in Mexico, he completed a master's degree in zoology at the University of Arizona from 1963 , which he completed in 1965. In 1965, he enrolled for a doctoral degree in zoology from Louisiana State University . He spent the summers of 1966 and 1968 in an Indian village in eastern Peru and part of 1966 and 1967 in Costa Rica . In August 1970 he was with the dissertation The Systematics of the genus Didelphis (Marsupialia: Didelphidae) in North and Middle America , led by George H. Lowery for Ph.D. PhD.

After a postdoctoral position at the MD Anderson Hospital and Tumor Institute in Houston , Texas , from 1970 to 1971 as well as assistant professorships at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge (1972–1973) and Tulane University (1973) in New Orleans , he became an May 1973 curator at the Smithsonian Institution's Bird and Mammal Laboratory, National Museum of Natural History .

Gardner's research covers the taxonomy, morphology, genetics, distribution, food habits, way of life and nomenclature of mammals in the Western Hemisphere. It is based on a synthesis of personal fieldwork and results from the examination of specimens in museum collections, combined with published information, in particular the earlier literature of the late 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 2005, Gardner wrote the articles on the opossum , mousepad , chiloé opossum , armadillos and tooth arms in the 3rd edition of Mammal Species of the World . In 2008 he was the editor of Mammals of South America , Volume 1: Marsupials, Xenarthrans, Shrews, and Bats . In 2014 he was part of the writing team for the List of Recent Land Mammals of Mexico .

He was involved in the first descriptions of over 25 opossum, bat and rodent species from the Neotropics . In 2010 he was elected an honorary member of the American Society of Mammalogists .

Dedication names

The following species and genera are named after Gardner: Proechimys gardneri da Silva , 1998, Rhipidomys gardneri Patton , da Silva & Malcolm , 2000, Monodelphis gardneri Solari , Pacheco , Vivar & Emmons , 2012, Gardnerycteris Hurtado & Pacheco , 2014 and Peromyscus gardneri Lorenzo , Álvarez-Castañeda , Pérez-Consuegra & Patton , 2016.

literature

• Matthew C. Perry (Ed.): The Washington Biologists' Field Club: Its Members and its History (1900-2006 ). Washington Biologists' Field Club, Washington, DC 2007, ISBN 978-0-615-16259-1 , pp. 135-136

Web links

• Employee Profile at the Smithsonian Institution
• Literature by and about Alfred L. Gardner in the WorldCat bibliographic database