Ernest Edward Williams

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Ernest Edward Williams

Ernest Edward Williams (born January 7, 1914 in Easton (Pennsylvania) , † September 1, 1998 in Pennsylvania ) was an American herpetologist .

Williams studied after military service in the Second World War at Columbia University with William King Gregory with his doctorate in 1950. His dissertation was on the structure of the neck vertebrae of turtles and the implications for their evolution. He then went to Harvard University as an assistant to Alfred Sherwood Romer , became an assistant professor and, in 1957, succeeded Arthur Loveridge as curator of herpetology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. In 1970 he received a full professorship and in 1972 he became Alexander Agassiz Professor of Zoology. In the same year he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences . In 1984 he retired.

His study of the systematics of turtles led him to the conclusion that the museum's holdings were broad, but insufficient for systematic purposes. In the course of his work as a curator, he quadrupled the holdings to over 300,000 copies at the time of his retirement in 1980. He particularly studied lizards of the genus Anolis from the Caribbean and Central and South America, which Thomas Barbour had already collected at the museum. Under Williams, the collection was expanded considerably because he wanted to conduct studies on evolution using their example. He found that they developed independently on the main Caribbean islands but with similar final forms depending on the ecological niche (ecomorphs, ecomorphs , a term he introduced).

He first described 50 species of reptiles. A number of reptiles are named in his honor.

Fonts

  • with Loveridge: Revision of the African tortoises and turtles of the suborder Cryptodira, Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, 115, 6, 1957

Web links

References and comments

  1. ↑ Ernest Edward Williams , US Social Security Death Directory (SSDI), accessed May 16, 2017
  2. ↑ Peter Uetz: The original descriptions of reptiles, Zootaxa, No. 2335, 2010, 59-68, pdf
personal data
SURNAME Williams, Ernest Edward
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American herpetologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 7, 1914
PLACE OF BIRTH Easton, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH September 1, 1998
Place of death Pennsylvania