Eugene Raymond Hall

Eugene Raymond Hall (born May 11, 1902 in Imes , Kansas , † April 2, 1986 in Lawrence , Kansas), usually called E. Raymond Hall in publications , was an American mammaloge .

Life

Hall was the only child of Wilbur Downs and Susan Effie Hall, née Donovan. He grew up on a farm in LeLoup , Franklin County , and gained his first experience of nature as a fur hunter. Hall's early school education was in Kansas. During his third year of high school , the family lived in Yakima , Washington , where they wanted to grow fruit . However, the recession in the northwest forced her to return to Kansas, where Hall graduated from Lawrence High School. He then enrolled in zoology at the University of Kansas . During his student days he shot a goldwing wood warbler , which turned out to be the first evidence of this species in Kansas and led to his first article in the journal The Auk in 1921 . Hall also had an interest in paleontology and wanted to specialize in the field, being influenced by Remington Kellogg , an employee of the US Bureau of Biological Survey (forerunner of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service ). In 1924 he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley , where he in 1925 a Master acquired Accounts and 1928 with the thesis A systematic revision of the weasels of the Americas , led by the zoologist and naturalist Joseph Grinnell for Ph.D. received his doctorate.

In 1927, Hall was appointed curator of the mammals at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology , a position he held until 1944. During this time he carried out extensive field studies on mammals in Nevada , on which he published the standard work The Mammals of Nevada in 1946 . Hall was executive director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology from 1938 to 1944. In 1944 he returned to Kansas, where he served as chairman of the department of zoology and director of the University of Kansas Natural History Museum until his retirement in 1967 . In 1958 he was appointed Summerfield Distinguished Professor at the University of Kansas. After his official retirement he devoted himself to research and writing. This was slowed down in 1983 by a heart attack and bypass surgery .

Hall's bibliography comprises nearly 350 titles, with the two-volume work The Mammals of North America , published in 1958, being considered to be his most important book. It was revised and reissued in 1981 by Hall in sole authorship. In 1951 the book American Weasels was published , in which the number of North American weasel species was limited from 30 to three valid species. In addition to numerous rodent subspecies, Hall described the Alaska marmot ( Marmota broweri ), the Saint Lawrence red- toothed shrew ( Sorex jacksoni ), the Cuban yellow bat ( Lasiurus insularis ), the spotted mouse-eared mouse ( Myotis elegans ) and the extinct genus Martinogale . In 1984 Hall's last study Geographic Variation among Brown and Grizzly Bears (Ursus arctos) in North America appeared , in which he fundamentally changed the taxonomy of the North American brown bears and limited the number of 96 taxa to eight subspecies.

Hall was a member of the American Society of Mammalogists , where he served as president from 1944 to 1946. In 1964 he was elected an honorary member.

In 1924 Hall married Mary Frances Harkey. The couple had three sons, each of whom became scientists.

literature

• J. Knox Jones, Jr .: Contributions in Mammalogy: A volume honoring Professor E. Raymond Hall , University of Kansas Museum of Natural History, Miscellaneous Publication, No. 51, 1969
• Elmer C. Birney, Jerry R. Choate: Seventy-five years of mammalogy, 1919-1994 , Special Publication No. II, The American Society of Mammalogists, 1994. (portrait on page 41)
• James S. Findley , J. Knox Jones, Jr .: Eugene Raymond Hall: 1902-1985. Journal of Mammalogy, Vol. 70, No. 2, American Society of Mammalogists, May 1989, pp. 455-458

Web links

• Entry in the American National Biography