George Sprague Myers

George Sprague Myers (born February 2, 1905 in Jersey City , New Jersey , † November 4, 1985 ) was an American zoologist and ichthyologist .

In his native Jersey City he attended primary school and high school , interrupted by a year at St. John's Military School in Ossining . Even as a teenager he was interested in fish and amphibians and published his first article in an aquarium journal in 1920, at the age of 15. The American Museum of Natural History in New York became one of his favorite places. There he met the herpetologist Gladwyn Kingsley Noble and his young assistant Karl Patterson Schmidt know. From 1922-24, Myers volunteered in Noble's laboratory and published about 30 papers on aquaristics and ichthyology. In 1924 he met the famous ichthyologist Carl H. Eigenmann from the Indiana University know, who encouraged him to enroll at Indiana University and helped him to finance their studies through part-time job as assistant to the curator of the fish collection. In the fall of 1926, Myers moved to Stanford University, where he studied with the well-known ichthyologists David Starr Jordan , Charles Henry Gilbert , John Otterbein Snyder and Edwin Chapin Starks . 1930 received his Bachelor of Arts . He wrote his doctoral thesis on the systematics of the African egg-laying toothcarps (today the Nothobranchiidae ) and the worldwide distribution of the egg-laying toothcarps.

His first position was at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC , where he became assistant curator and in charge of the fish department. There he took care of the fish collection, which has not been edited for 40 years and has published more than 200 publications during this time. In 1936, Myers returned to Stanford as an assistant professor of biology and curator of the zoological collections. There he taught systematic ichthyology, the paleontology of vertebrates , Biogeography and systematic Herpetology . In 1938, at the age of 33 and only two years' calling at Stanford, George Myers was promoted to full professor five years after his doctorate.

Myers dealt intensively with biogeography, was a supporter of Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift and opposed the theory of permanence , the assumption that the distribution of the continents and oceans on earth had fundamentally not changed.

During the Great Depression and World War II , Myers spent nearly two and a half years in Brazil, working for a US State Department program to promote good US relations with Latin America. During this time he collected and studied fish and frogs and quickly established himself as one of the leading experts in the field of South American ichthyology, herpetology and biogeography. He stayed at Stanford University for 34 years, published more than 600 publications and worked intermittently in the editorial offices of various scientific, ichthyological and aquaristic journals.

After retiring on August 31, 1970, he became visiting professor of ichthyology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University , spending half of the year in Cambridge and the other half at his home in Scotts Valley , California .

Myers has been married four times. He has two sons with Martha Ruth Frisinger, his first wife.

The fish species is named after Myers Pangio myersi (a species of thorny eye ).

Web links

• MEMORIAL RESOLUTION GEORGE SPRAGUE MYERS (1905 - 1985) (PDF; 20 kB)

Individual evidence

1. ^ Axel Zarske: Pangio myersi. In: Claus Schaefer, Torsten Schröer (Hrsg.): The large lexicon of aquaristics. Eugen Ulmer, Stuttgart 2004, ISBN 3-8001-7497-9 , p. 740.