John Roxborough Norman

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John Roxborough Norman (born September 9, 1898 in Putney , London , † May 26, 1944 in Tring , Hertfordshire ), was a British ichthyologist .

Life

After graduating from St Paul's School (London), John R. Norman started working for Lloyds Banking Company in London. In 1917 he was drafted into the Queen Victoria's Rifles , but in 1918 he was dismissed as unfit for service after suffering from rheumatic fever . Then Norman began studying zoology at Imperial College London . In 1921 he was proposed for a vacancy at the Natural History Museum and left Imperial College without a degree.

At the Natural History Museum, Norman took the position of curator of the ichthyological collection from Charles Tate Regan , who had previously been promoted to head of the museum's zoological department. When Norman took up his post, he found the fish collection laid out according to outdated systematic criteria, and a number of collections that had been acquired earlier had not even been inventoried. Until 1936, Norman worked with his employees to modernize the presentation of the permanent collection.

Norman's work was made more difficult by the fact that in many cases he had to carry out a revision of higher taxa before a satisfactory inventory was made . A number of important publications resulted from his work at the Natural History Museum. In 1931, A History of Fishes was a standard work on the natural history of fish. From 1927 onwards, Norman worked on the fish of the first research expeditions of the Discovery Investigations and acquired the reputation of an excellent taxonomist with the publications on it, which were published from 1931. He confirmed this reputation with a monograph on flatfish , the first volume of which dealt with hard ray flounder , flounder and plaice . Norman could not finish the second volume. Another important work was the list of all orders, families and genera of recent fish with identification keys planned with George Sprague Myers . Norman's part was not published as a reproduced manuscript until 1966.

At the beginning of the Second World War, Norman was transferred to the Natural History Museum at Tring , where he was responsible for the part of the zoological collection of Walter Rothschild, 2nd Baron Rothschild, which remained in Great Britain . The processing of the collection, including the inventory, the photography and the redesign of the presentation, occupied him for years.

During his entire professional life, Norman suffered from the effects of his rheumatic disease. In autumn 1943 his health deteriorated dramatically, so that he could no longer go to his place of work in the museum. During his illness, he was still finishing the biography of his friend and colleague Charles Davies Sherborn , who died the previous year . Norman died on May 26, 1944, leaving behind his wife and two children. Even decades after Norman's death, popular science books he wrote continued to appear in the original or in translations into other languages.

Norman became a member of the Linnean Society of London in 1923 , of which he was Vice President from 1940 to 1941.

Dedication names (selection)

Initial descriptions (selection)

Publications (selection)

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b c d e W. PC Tenison and Ethelwynn Trewavas: John Roxbrough Norman [sic!]. In: Proceedings of the Linnean Society of London 1945, Vol. 156, No. 3, pp. 199-242, here pp. 214-217, doi : 10.1111 / j.1095-8312.1945.tb00394.x .
  2. ↑ a b Ethelwynn Trewavas : John R. Norman . In: Copeia 1944, No. 3, pp. 265-266, JSTOR 1438704 .
personal data
SURNAME Norman, John Roxborough
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Norman, John R. (shortened name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British ichthyologist
DATE OF BIRTH September 9, 1898
PLACE OF BIRTH Putney , London
DATE OF DEATH May 26, 1944
Place of death Tring , Hertfordshire