J. Mary Taylor

Jocelyn Mary Taylor (born May 30, 1931 in Portland , Oregon , † February 15, 2019 ) was an American zoologist (mammal login). Her main research interests were rodents .

Life

Taylor was the daughter of Kathleen and Arnold L. Taylor. Even before she went to kindergarten, she decided to stop using her first name. At 17 she played tennis and took part in a prestigious junior tennis tournament in Great Britain. She also played the piano and devoted herself to chamber music.

Taylor originally intended to study music at Smith College , but a senior year biology course in her high school resulted in her attending further biology classes in college and eventually a zoology degree with a particular interest in protozoa . In 1952 she obtained her bachelor's degree. In 1953 she graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a Masters. She then accepted a position in the Department of Zoology at Connecticut College . In 1954 she received a Fulbright scholarship , with which she researched the Australian mammal fauna for a year. This research was the basis for her dissertation, Reproductive biology of the Australian bush rat, Rattus assimilis , which earned her a Ph.D. in 1959 from the University of California, Berkeley. received his doctorate. Even before her doctorate, she worked at Wellesley College , where she stayed until 1965.

In collaboration with Elizabeth Horner, she conducted studies on Australian rodents and small marsupials . During her time in Wellesley, she and Helen Padykula of Harvard Medical School did research on the placenta of marsupials.

In 1965 she became the first female professor in the Department of Zoology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and the first woman to take over the management of the Cowan Vertebrate Museum . After the department of vertebrate zoology received less and less support from the University of British Columbia, Taylor resigned from her post in 1982. She moved back to Oregon with her husband, entomologist Joseph William Kamp, whom she met in British Columbia , where she held a position as a research fellow at the Regional Primate Research Center in Beaverton , Oregon and an honorary professorship at Oregon State University in Corvallis assumed. In the same year, she was the first woman to be elected President of the American Society of Mammalogists for two years , where she was an honorary member from 2001.

In 1987 she became director of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History . In 1989 she became chair of the SSC / IUCN Rodent Specialist Group. In 1990, she became Vice President of the Association of Science Museum Directors . She retired in June 1996 and was made Honorary Trustee and Curator Emerita of the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.

Works (selection)

• Reproductive biology of the Australian bush rat, Rattus assimilis, 1961
• Systematics of native Australian Rattus (Rodentia, Muridae), 1973 (with Elizabeth Horner)
• The Oxford Guide to Mammals of Australia, 1984

literature

• Elmer C. Birney; Jerry R. Choate: Seventy-five years of mammalogy, 1919-1994 , Special Publication No. II The American Society of Mammalogists, 1994. pp. 62-63

Individual evidence

1. ^ Obituary from legacy.com, accessed June 11, 2019