Keppel Harcourt Barnard

Keppel Harcourt Barnard (born March 13, 1887 in London , † September 22, 1964 in Cape Town ) was a British-South African zoologist and director of the South African Museum in Cape Town. Its author's abbreviation, the first to describe numerous newly discovered animal species, is " KH Barnard " to distinguish it from the entomologist George Barnard and the marine biologist Jerry Laurens Barnard .

Youth and Studies

Keppel Harcourt Barnard was the only son of the solicitor Harcourt George Barnard and his wife Anne Elizabeth, nee Porter. Keppel Barnard grew up in London, where he attended the Primary School, before going on a junior high school in Mannheim moved to German to learn. He later enrolled in a public school in Camberley , Surrey .

From 1905 to 1908 he studied at Christ's College , Cambridge , and completed a degree in natural sciences, the Natural Sciences Tripos, consisting of botany , zoology and geology . He also attended lectures in anthropology , ethnology, and geography . Upon completion of the baccalaureate , he went back to London and he studied his father Law and in 1911 as a barrister admitted. But Barnard was more interested in the natural sciences, and so he worked for a short time at the marine biology laboratory in Plymouth . Eventually he went to South Africa in 1911 , where he began his work at the South African Museum in Cape Town, for which he worked for more than 50 years. He graduated from Cambridge University ( MA ) in absentia in 1913.

South Africa

The South African Museum was the second oldest scientific institution in South Africa. It was founded in 1825 by Lord Charles Somerset . The museum had only limited resources and few staff. Barnard took over the marine biology department in 1911. Until his retirement in 1956, he remained the only marine biologist at the museum. Although he had to do without technical staff and assistants, he developed a rich collection activity and expanded the presentation of the collections. However, he became known through his publications, including many first descriptions of the then little researched invertebrates of southern Africa, with a focus on marine fauna.

Barnard was a passionate mountaineer and from 1918 to 1945 he was secretary of the Mountain Club of South Africa . The expeditions to the mountains of the country gave him the opportunity to get to know the mountain streams and rivers and to study the insect larvae of the caddis flies , stoneflies and mayflies that live in them. He also collected numerous species of beetles, mainly from the Lucanidae family . He was also able to publish important works on these animal groups.

Expeditions

In 1912 he started an expedition to the coast of Mozambique , in 1913 an expedition took him to the coast of the Natal province . An expedition into the Inner Natal followed in 1917. In the 1920s, Barnard took part in the zoological inventory of South West Africa , today's Republic of Namibia , and visited Ovamboland in the north, the Kaokoveld in the northwest to the Kunene , the border river to Angola . In 1926 an expedition took him to the Orange River , the border river between South Africa and South West Africa, to the Augrabies Falls , today's Augrabies Falls National Park in Namaqualand in the Northern Cape Province and to the Gordonia District in what is now Botswana .

Directorate of the museum

In 1921 Barnard became the assistant director of the South African Museum . In 1924, after Louis Peringuey's death, he became managing director for a short time. From 1942 to 1946 he was again managing director, from 1946 until his retirement he was director of the museum. Even after his retirement in 1956, he continued to work daily as an honorary curator of the marine biology department and devoted himself to the revision of the mollusc system .

Private

In 1915 Barnard married Alice Watkins. The couple had two children, a son and a daughter. In 1924 he received his doctorate from the University of Cape Town with a thesis on the distribution of various crustaceans in South African waters.

On September 22, 1964, Keppel Harcourt Barnard died of a cerebral haemorrhage .

Fonts

• Contributions to the Crustacean fauna of South Africa. 10. A revision of the South African Branchiopoda (Phyllopoda). In: Annals of the South African Museum 29, 1929, pp. 181-272

Web links

• Barnard, Dr Keppel Harcourt (zoology). Biography at S2A3, Biographical Database of Southern African Science (English)