Guy Musser

Guy Graham Musser (born August 10, 1936 in Salt Lake City , Utah ) is an American zoologist . He discovered and described numerous new taxa of the old world mice (Murinae).

Live and act

Almost complete skull of Coryphomys musseri (left) compared in size to the skull of a house rat

Musser attended primary and secondary schools by 1955. 1967 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the classification of Rotbauchhörnchens ( Sciurus aureogaster ) for Ph.D. In 1966 he became an employee of the American Museum of Natural History , where he became the curator of the mammals department. He has been a curator emeritus since his retirement in 2002. In the 1960s and 1970s he wrote numerous scientific articles on croissants, New World mice and Old World mice. In the 1970s he led a three-year expedition to Sulawesi, where he discovered several new species of mice and rats.

In the early 1980s Musser published some of his most important works, including Notes on systematics of Indo-Malayan murid rodents, and descriptions of new genera and species from Ceylon, Sulawesi, and the Philippines (1981), The giant rat of Flores and its relatives east of Borneo and Bali (1981), Crunomys and the small-bodied shrew rats native to the Philippine Islands and Sulawesi (Celebes) (1982) and Malaysian murids and the giant rat of Sumatra (1983, together with Cameron Newcomb). This work led to a revision within the systematics of the Asiatic Old World mice and to the division of the genus Rattus into several new genera. He later wrote numerous articles on various Old World mice from Asia and Australasia and, in 1998, a revision within the subfamily Sigmodontinae , a group of South American rodents from the burrower family .

Musser is one of the authors of the reference work Mammal Species of the World (1993 and 2005), where he wrote the chapter on the order of rodents together with Michael D. Carlton . In addition, he frequently wrote articles for the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Guy Musser is married to Mary Ellen Holden, a zoologist and upper elementary director of a Christian school in Charleston, South Carolina . They have three children and live on James Island, South Carolina.

Guy Musser received the 1992 Clinton Hart Merriam Award from the American Society of Mammalogists . The extinct giant rat Coryphomys musseri is named after him.

Works (selection)

• 1968: A systematic study of the Mexican and Guatemalan gray squirrel: Sciurus aureogaster F. Cuvier (Rodentia: Sciuridae)
• 1981: The giant rat of Flores and its relatives east of Borneo and Bali * 1982: Crunomys and the small-bodied shrew rats native to the Philippine Islands
• 1983: Malaysian murids and the giant rat of Sumatra
• 1992: Philippine rodents: definitions of Tarsomys and Limnomys plus a preliminary assessment of phylogenetic patterns among native Philippine murines (Murinae, Muridae)
• 1993/2005: Order Rodentia In: Don E. Wilson & DeAnn M. Reeder (eds.): Mammal Species of the World (with Michael D. Carlton)
• 1998: Systematic studies of oryzomyine rodents (Muridae, Sigmodontinae): diagnoses and distributions of species formerly assigned to Oryzomys "capito"

literature

• Michael D. Carlton: Chapter 1. They Sort Out Like Nuts and Bolts: A Scientific Biography of Guy G. Musser In: Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History No. 331: pp. 4-32. 2009

Web links

• Short biography at the American Museum Natural History