Clifford H. Pope

Clifford Hillhouse Pope (born April 11, 1899 in Washington , Georgia , † June 3, 1974 in Escondido , California ) was an American herpetologist and non-fiction author.

Life

Pope was the son of Mark Cooper Pope and Harriett Pope, nee Hull. In 1917 he enrolled at the University of Georgia , but two years later moved to the University of Virginia , where he obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1921 . From 1921 to 1926 he was involved as a herpetologist and assistant in the expeditions of Roy Chapman Andrews in Central Asia . Andrews worked with the main expedition group in northern China and Mongolia , where they discovered the first dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert . Pope, on the other hand, employed only Chinese assistants, collected in southern China, especially in Fujian on the coast and on the Hainan archipelago . Large collections were amalgamated and sent to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City , on which Karl Patterson Schmidt , a colleague of Pope, wrote his first articles.

After his return from China, Pope himself began extensive studies of the collected material and published a dozen scientific articles on amphibians and reptiles as well as popular science travel literature between 1928 and 1934, beginning in 1924. In 1928 Pope became assistant curator at the herpetological department of the American Museum of Natural history. In the same year he married Sarah Haydock Davis. From this marriage there were three children. In 1930 he began the manuscript for his only scientific book, published in 1935 under the title The Reptiles of China . It was the first comprehensive book on the reptiles of China and was based not only on Pope's own collections but also on a study of the available museum material. A planned follow-up work on amphibians with color illustrations by the Chinese animal artist Hao-ting Wang remained unpublished. Instead, in 1940, in collaboration with Alice M. Boring, a brief overview of amphibians was published under the title A survey of Chinese Amphibia .

In 1935 Pope was elected President of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists . That same year, he was dismissed from his curatorial post , likely due to a personal conflict with department director Gladwyn Kingsley Noble . Since Pope lost his post at the height of the Great Depression , but had previously had some success with popular science writings, he made his living entirely by writing non-fiction. Snakes Alive and How They Live appeared in 1937, followed by Turtles of the United States and Canada in 1939 and China's Animal Frontier in 1940.

In 1941, Pope became a curator at the Department of Amphibians and Reptiles at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago . He succeeded Karl Patterson Schmidt, who had meanwhile taken over the chief curatorial post of the zoological department of the Field Museum. Pope's research dealt with snakes and, after World War II, with salamanders. From 1947 to 1951 he published eight scientific articles on the family of the lungless salamanders (Plethodontidae), including the first descriptions of the species Plethodon caddoensis (1951) and Plethodon dixi (1949). To Popes another first descriptions include amphibian species Hyla sanchiangensis (1929), Megophrys kuatunensis (1929), Amolops chunganensis (1929), Pelophylax fukienensis (1929), Leptobrachium LIUi (1947) and Amolops hongkongensis (1951) and the reptile species Gekko hokouensis (1928) , Lycodon flavozonatus (1928), Lycodon futsingensis (1928), Opisthotropis kuatunensis (1928), Pseudoxenodon karlschmidti (1928), Sinomicrurus kelloggi (1928) and Takydromus sylvaticus (1928).

In 1953 Pope left the museum and devoted himself entirely to writing. In 1955 the book The Reptile World was published , which was published in a shortened version in 1957 under the title Reptiles Round the World with illustrations by Helen Damrosch Tee-Van . In 1961 his last book The Giant Snakes came out.

Dedication names

After Pope of are skinks Emoia popei and Plestiodon popei and Natternart Hebius popei named. Pope's pit viper ( Trimeresurus popeiorum ) was named after Pope and his wife Sarah H. Pope.

literature

• Robert F. Inger : Clifford H. Pope In: Copeia , Volume 1974, No. 4 (December 31, 1974), p. 1012
• Kraig Adler , John S. Applegarth, Ronald Altig: Contributions to the History of Herpetology. (= Contributions to herpetology. 5). Society for the Study of Amphibians and Reptiles, 1989, ISBN 0-916984-19-2 , p. 94.
• Clifford Hillhouse Pope. Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2003. Biography In Context, accessed December 6, 2018.