Marmaduke Tunstall

Marmaduke Tunstall

Marmaduke Tunstall (* 1743 Burton Constable in Yorkshire , † October 11, 1790 in Wycliffe Hall in Yorkshire) was an English ornithologist and collector.

Live and act

His father Cuthbert Tunstall, a doctor and antiquarian , called himself in 1718 after the death of his uncle in Cuthbert Constable (1680-1746). He married Elizabeth b. Heneage († 1766). From their marriage, Marmaduke emerged as the fifth child.

When his father died, Marmaduke was only four years old. His mother, who shared his interest in natural history with him, probably sent him to college in Douai , France, with the help of his uncle William Constable .

In 1760, following the death of his uncle Marmaduke Tunstall , he inherited the properties of Scargill, Hutton Long Villers, and Wycliff. At the same time he took on the original name of his father again with Tunstall, because up to this point his name was still Marmaduke Constable.

At the age of 21 he was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London . After completing his studies, he moved to Welbeck Street in London for a few years . It was here that he began building his museum, which enabled him to research the most diverse aspects of natural history. Since the preservation of type specimens was only possible to a very limited extent at this time, he kept a large number of living animals, focusing on the birds. Unlike many later museum curators, he studied their behavior and habitat. One of the greatest beneficiaries of this collection was the illustrator Peter Brown ( bl. 1758–1799). He was also in correspondence with Thomas Pennant (1726–1798), the British botanist Alexander Moon (1755–1825) and many others during this time .

Tunstall is the author of Ornithologica Britannica (1771), probably the first British work with binomial nomenclature .

He was the first author for the gray wagtail ( Motacilla cinerea ) Tunstall , 1771, the Pacific pipit ( Anthus rubescens ) ( Tunstall , 1771) and the peregrine falcon ( Falco peregrinus ) Tunstall , 1771, as well as a subspecies of the Merlin Falco columbarius aesalon Tunstall , 1771. Additionally he introduced the genus name Pyrrhocorax Tunstall in 1771 for the mountain crows .

After Tunstall's sudden death in 1790, George Allen (1736–1800) from Darlington bought the collection of his friend Tunstall. He later sold it to the museum in Newcastle upon Tyne , where it was scattered in different locations at the end of the 19th century. Today there are only a few exhibits by Tunstall in the Great North Museum (former Hancock Museum ).

Works

• Ornithologia Britannica, seu, Avium omnium Britannicarum tam terrestrium, quam aquaticarum catalogus, sermone latino, anglico & gallico redditus: cui subjicitur appendix, avec alienigenas, in Angliam raro advenientes, complectens . J. Dixwell, London 1771, doi : 10.5962 / bhl.title.14122 . (Translation of the title: Ornithology of Britain, that is, of all British birds, both on earth and in the water, a catalog of the names in Latin, English and French and an appendix with foreign and rarely occurring species in England )

literature

• George Townshend Fox: Memoirs of Marmaduke Tunstall, esq., And George Allan, esq. : together with notices of the works of Thomas Bewick . Emerson Charnlay, Newcastle 1827 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
• Michael J. Boyd, Leslie Jessop: A 'truly amiable gentleman': a new light on the life and work of Marmaduke Tunstall (1743-1790) of Wycliffe, North Yorkshire . In: Archives of Natural History . tape 24 , no. 2 , 1998, p. 221-235 .
• Leslie Jessop: The fate of Marmaduke Tunstall's collections . In: Archives of Natural History . tape 26 , no. 1 , 1999, p. 33-49 .

Web links

• Correspondence between Marmaduke Tunstall and Carl von Linné
• Benefactor's historic trust fund will be relaunched at Teesdale Mercury on May 3, 2011

Individual evidence

1. ↑ George Townshend Fox, p. 25
2. ↑ ^{a b} George Townshend Fox, p. 9
3. ↑ George Townshend Fox, p. 10
4. ^ Teesdale Mercury, May 3, 2011