Gladwyn Kingsley Noble

Gladwyn Kingsley Noble (born September 20, 1894 in Yonkers , New York , † December 9, 1940 in Englewood , New Jersey ) was an American zoologist. His research focus was herpetology .

Live and act

Noble's father was the founder of the New York publishing house Barnes & Noble . In 1917 Gladwyn Kingsley Noble graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and in 1918 a Master of Arts at Harvard University , where he developed a close friendship with Thomas Barbour . In 1917 he accepted a position as assistant curator in the department of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History , which he continued after the war . In 1922 he received his doctorate with the thesis The Phylogeny of the Salientia at Columbia University for Ph.D. After the death of Mary Cynthia Dickerson (1866–1923) he became a curator in 1924. In 1928, the herpetological department of the American Museum of Natural History was renamed the Department of Herpetology and Experimental Biology. Noble was head of this department until his death in 1940. He had two new museum rooms set up, in which the behavior of the animals was presented in a more understandable way for the public. The catalog of the herpetological department, which in 1924 still had 50,000 copies, had 110,000 copies by 1940. Noble's assistants included Charles Mitchill Bogert (1908–1992), Clifford H. Pope (1899–1974), Carl Frederick Kauffeld (1911–1974) and Karl Patterson Schmidt (1890–1957). Noble was a member of the American Society of Mammalogists and a corresponding member of the Zoological Society of London . In 1933 he was elected a member of the American Philosophical Society . In addition to his work at the museum, Noble worked as a nature filmmaker. So he turned a silent film about a black-headed gull colony on the island Muskeget ( Massachusetts ), the first time in 1940 at a meeting of the American Ornithologists' Union was performed.

Noble published 180 publications, 140 of which were devoted to reptiles and amphibians. His first scientific descriptions, some of which were created in collaboration with Outram Bangs , Edward Harrison Taylor and Thomas Barbour , include the Peru screech owl , the Guadeloupe ameive , the Mona rhinoceros iguana , the ghost frogs , the Seychelles frogs and the barbour frogs . Noble hit the headlines when he wrote a damning article about the Austrian biologist Paul Kammerer in Nature on August 7, 1926 . Noble accused Kammerer as a forger, the cornea of the points after the midwife toad , which were previously held for nuptial pads had as emerges under the skin sprayed black ink. Kammerer affirmed in a letter that he had nothing to do with the forgery and committed suicide on September 23, 1926.

Noble died in 1940 of a strep infection .

Dedication names

In 1930 Thomas Barbour named the frog genus Noblella from the Strabomantidae family after Gladwyn Kingsley Noble. Other dedication names are Eleutherodactylus noblei (Barbour & Dunn , 1921) and Craugastor noblei (Barbour & Dunn, 1921).

Publications (selection)

• 1915: A revision of the lizards of the genus Ameiva (with Thomas Barbour)
• 1916: A revision of the lizards of the genus Cyclura (with Thomas Barbour)
• 1916: The resident birds of Guadeloupe
• with Outram Bangs: List of Birds Collected on the Harvard Peruvian Expedition of 1916 . In: The Auk . tape 35 , no. 4 , 1918, pp. 442–463 ( sora.unm.edu [PDF; 959 kB ]).
• 1922: The phylogeny of the Salientia: 1. Osteology and the thigh musculature; their bearing on classification and phylogeny
• 1924: Contributions to the herpetology of the Belgian Congo: based on the collections of the American Museum Congo Expedition, 1909-1915
• 1943: The Social Behavior of the Laughing Gull
• 1946: The Nature of the Beast, A popular account of animal psychology from the point of view of a naturalist , Doubleday & Company, Garden City NY
• 1954: The Biology of the Amphibia , Dover Publications, New York

literature

• William B. Davis: Obituary Notices Gladwyn Kingsley Noble 1894-1940 . In: Journal of Mammalogy , Vol. 22, No. 2 (May, 1941), p. 224
• WL Necker: Gladwyn Kingsley Noble, 1894-1940; a herpetological bibliography In: Herpetologica 2 (2) (1940): pp. 47-55
• Gregg Mitman: Reel Nature: America's Romance with Wildlife on Film. Harvard University Press, 1999: pp. 64-69. ISBN 978-0-674-71571-4
• Kraig Adler (1989). Contributions to the History of Herpetology, Society for the study of amphibians and reptiles: 202 S., ISBN 0-916984-19-2