Benjamin Shreve

Benjamin Shreve (born March 7, 1908 in Salem , Massachusetts , † July 16, 1985 in Bedford , Massachusetts) was an American amateur herpetologist and jeweler.

Life

Shreve was the son of Benjamin Darland and Katharine Sanders Shreve. In 1927 he came as a student at Harvard University , which he left after a year without a degree. From September 1930 he worked in the ornithological and mammalogical departments of the Museum of Comparative Zoology (MCZ). In 1931 he moved to the herpetological department, where he was commissioned by Thomas Barbour , director of the museum, to identify the incoming collections of reptiles and amphibians . His mentor was Arthur Loveridge , the curator of the MCZ's herpetology department. After his father's death in 1957, Shreve and his two younger brothers inherited the Boston jewelry house Shreve, Crump & Low, which was founded in 1797 and purchased by his great-grandfather. While Shreve's brothers were working in the business, he was more devoted to bird watching . Benjamin Shreve lived with his mother for a long time, and when she died in 1962 he married her carer Minerva C. Read. He worked as a volunteer for the Museum of Comparative Zoology for nearly 50 years. In 1979 he retired into private life for health reasons.

Between 1934 and 1968, Shreve was the lead author or co-author of 33 scientific papers. Most were brief initial descriptions of frog, lizard and snake taxa . He also published significant records of distribution areas. In 1938 he provided evidence that the flower pot snake ( Indotyphlops braminus ) also occurs in the western hemisphere . In 1947, together with Arthur Loveridge, he was able to identify the snapping turtle species Devisia mythodes , described in 1905 by James Douglas Ogilby and supposedly from the Fly River in New Guinea, as a misidentified specimen of the North American snapping turtle ( Chelydra serpentina ).

Shreve described 74 new species and subspecies of amphibians and reptiles from Latin America and South Asia. These included 28 frogs, 35 lizards and 11 snakes, adding to Loveridge's geographic focus on Africa and Australia. 40 taxa described by Shreve come from the West Indies , in particular from Cuba , Bahamas , the Dominican Republic , Haiti and the Turks and Caicos Islands . Some of these descriptions were created in collaboration with Thomas Barbour or Ernest Edward Williams . The remaining 36 taxa were from Bolivia, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru as well as Burma and Ceylon. Since Shreve never did field work himself, he only described specimens from outside collectors.

Dedication names

Four species of reptiles and four frogs were named after Benjamin Shreve. These are:

• Dipsadoboa shrevei ( Loveridge , 1932)
• Oreobates shrevei ( Parker , 1935)
• Anolis shrevei ( Cochran , 1939)
• Sphaerodactylus shrevei Lazell , 1961
• Dendrobates shrevei (now a synonym of Andinobates minutus )
• Hyla shrevei (now a synonym of Osteopilus wilderi )
• Anomaloglossus shrevei ( Rivero , 1961)
• Pristimantis shrevei ( Schwartz , 1967)

literature

• Kraig Adler (Ed.): Contributions to the History of Herpetology , Volume 3, Contributions to Herpetology Volume 29, Society for the study of amphibians and reptiles, 2012. ISBN 978-0-916984-82-3 . Pp. 248-249
• Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Amphibians. Exeter, England: Pelagic Publishing Ltd., 2013. ISBN 978-1-907807-44-2 . P. 197

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} Find a Grave: Benjamin Shreve
2. ^ Benjamin Shreve: Typhlops braminus in Mexico. Herpetologica 1, 1938: 144.
3. ^ Arthur Loveridge, Benjamin Shreve: The "New Guinea" snapping turtle (Chelydra serpentina). Copeia 1947 (2): 120-123