Pierce bread basket
William Pierce Brodkorb (born September 29, 1908 in Chicago , Illinois , † July 18, 1992 in Gainesville , Florida ) was an American paleontologist and ornithologist .
Life
At 16, Brodkorb learned how to dissect birds at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago . In 1930 he graduated from the University of Illinois . For the next two years, Brodkorb collected birds in Idaho and prepared them for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Cleveland , Ohio on behalf of Harry Church Oberholser . In July 1931 he married Edna Carleton, who accompanied him on many excursions. In 1940 the couple's only daughter was born. In 1976 the marriage was divorced.
Brodkorb enrolled at the University of Michigan in 1933 and received his Ph.D. in 1936. Soon after, he became an assistant curator at the Museums at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor , Michigan . He undertook several expeditions that took him to the Bermuda Islands and in 1937, 1939 and 1941 to southern Mexico . In 1943 he published the monograph Birds of the Gulf Lowlands of Southern Mexico about his field work in Mexico . After the Second World War, he took up a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville in 1946 , which he held until his retirement in December 1989.
In the early 1950s, Brodkorb specialized in fossil birds. He amassed a vast collection of Florida bird fossils dated to the Miocene , Pliocene, and Pleistocene . This collection includes 12,500 bird skeletons from 129 families and is housed in the Florida Museum of Natural History , a division of the University of Florida. In 1960, in his How Many Species of Birds Have Existed? hypothesized that 1.634 million bird species must have existed on earth since the Cretaceous period. However, this supposition has been dismissed as exaggerated by other scientists such as James Fisher , who in turn estimated the number to be less than 500,000 species. From 1963 to 1978 Brodkorb published the five-volume Catalog of Fossil Birds . In 1982 he became an honorary member of the Florida Ornithological Society .
Brodkorb described several prehistoric bird genera, including Alexornis and Titanis and the Idiornithidae family . Taxa such as Paraptenodytes brodkorbi , Aegolius acadicus brodkorbi , Empidonax fulvifrons brodkorbi and Henocitta brodkorbi were named after him.
Web links
- In memoriam: Pierce Brodkorb
- Obituary by Storrs Lovejoy Olson (PDF file; 425 kB)
- Catalog of fossil birds - Online
Individual evidence
- ↑ Pierce Brodkorb: How Many Species of Birds Have Existed? In: Bulletin of the Florida State Museum Number 5. pp. 41-53 online
- ↑ James Fisher & Roger Tory Peterson: Birds . 1964 (German: The colorful book of birds . Translated by Wilhelm Meise . Moderner Buchvertrieb und Verlag GmbH. Mannheim, 1979), p. 75
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Brodkorb, Pierce |
| ALTERNATIVE NAMES | Brodkorb, William Pierce (full name) |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American paleontologist and ornithologist |
| DATE OF BIRTH | September 29, 1908 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Chicago , Illinois |
| DATE OF DEATH | July 18, 1992 |
| Place of death | Gainesville , Florida |