George Robert train

George Robert Zug (born November 16, 1938 in Carlisle , Pennsylvania ) is an American herpetologist .

Life

Zug grew up as an only child in the semi-rural community of Mount Holly Springs , where he observed the local fauna and flora from an early age. In the late 1950s, while studying at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania, he met the zoologist Albert Schwartz , who became his first important scientific mentor. He took him on his research trips to Cuba, where he introduced him to herpetological field work . In 1960, Zug received his bachelor's degree and in 1963 he graduated with a Master of Science degree from the University of Florida at Gainesville , where the morphology of turtle penises was a research focus. In 1968 he received his doctorate with a thesis Buoyancy, locomotion, morphology of the pelvic girdle and hindlimb, and systematics of cryptodiran turtles for Ph.D. at the University of Michigan . In 1975 Zug became curator of the herpetological department of the National Museum of Natural History , a position he held until his retirement in 2007.

Between 1971 and 1972, Zug went to New Guinea with his family for six months . In this long-term study funded by the Smithsonian Institution , Zug researched frogs, skinks and geckos from the Austro-Papua region. In the period that followed, research projects were added in the South Pacific . In 1997, Zug accepted an invitation from Chris Wemmer to a training workshop in Myanmar , where he got to know the techniques used by the Burmese national park staff. He participated in a herpetology survey program developed in collaboration with the California Academy of Sciences and funded by the National Science Foundation . Interns, research assistants, postdocs, and other fellow professionals at the Smithsonian Institution were involved in the results of this project.

Zug integrated slow-motion studies into his research work, with which he recorded the movements of turtles and frogs. He applied the technique of skeletochronology to the endangered sea ​​turtles , as it represented a reliable tool for Zug to better determine the age and sexual maturity of the long-lived marine reptiles and to develop meaningful protection plans from the information obtained.

Zug published over 100 peer-reviewed publications and over 160 other scientific papers, including four major studies on frog locomotion. For 2016 he was awarded the Fitch Award .

Dedication names

In 1958 Albert Schwartz named the frog species Eleutherodactylus zugi, which occurs in Cuba, after Zug. In 1984 Joseph Patric Ward honored Zug in the species epithet of the Rio Grande eared turtle ( Pseudemys gorzugi ). In 2005, Wolfgang Böhme and Thomas Ziegler named the Waran species Varanus zugorum after Zug and his wife Patricia. In 2008 the gecko species Cyrtodactylus zugi was named after Zug.

literature

• Ron Heyer & Miriam Heyer: Zug and Weitzman Retire In: Backbone Newsletter of the Department of Vertebrate Zoology, National Museum of Natural History, vol. 20, no.1, January 2007
• Bo Beolens, Michael Watkins, Michael Grayson: The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore MD 2011, ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5 , p. 294