Pieter Ouwens

Pieter Anthonis Ouwens (born February 14, 1849 in Amsterdam , † March 5, 1922 in Buitenzorg , Dutch East Indies ), also Peter Antonie Ouwens , was a Dutch army officer and zoologist . He became famous for his notes on the Komodo dragon .

Life

Ouwens was the son of Pieter Anthonis Ouwens senior, accountant in Amsterdam, and Caroline Reiniera Nagels. When he was ten months old, his father died. His interest in animals was supported by the single mother. In September 1866 he became a cadet at the Royal Military Academy in Breda and in July 1871 he joined the Koninklijk Nederlandsch-Indisch Leger , where he served as a second lieutenant in the infantry. On July 1, 1872, he arrived on board the Robertus Hendrikus in Batavia (now Jakarta). In 1883 he was promoted to captain. He did military service all over the Dutch East Indies and in his spare time he collected reptiles, mussels and insects. As a result of his work, Ouwens learned the native languages ​​of Borneo, Celebes (now Sulawesi), Java and Sumatra. In 1895 he retired from military service with the rank of major. Due to his limited wealth, he stayed on Java, where he became friends with several people, including the Dutch governor general . In January 1879 he married Johanna Vosmaer in Banda Aceh . In 1882 they divorced a month after the birth of their only child in Salatiga and Ouwens married Jeanne Dikkers in December 1883 in Purworejo. In 1902 he married Anna Josephina Soesman.

Ouwens was one of the co-founders of the Zoological Museum and Wekplaats (now the Museum Zoologicum Bogorinse) on the grounds of the Bogor Botanical Garden . The museum opened in 1901 and Ouwens was appointed curator in 1905. During his very successful activity, both the scientific collections and the public exhibitions increased, and several extensions were made to the building.

In 1910, Lieutenant Jacques Karel Henri van Steyn van Hensbroek gave Ouwens a photo and skin of a very large species of monitor lizard , which the locals of Flores and Komodo called boeja darat (land crocodile). Van Hensbroek was the first western traveler to see the monitor lizards. Ouwens sent a collector to Komodo, who returned to Java with two adults and one young. In its first description from 1912 Ouwens named the species Varanus komodoensis . Other animal species described by Ouwens are the mountain anoa ( Bubalus quarlesi ) and the white-bellied snapping turtle ( Elseya branderhorsti ). Between 1907 and 1916 he published six articles on reptiles, including lists of snakes in 1908 and turtles in 1914. In 1912 he provided evidence that the frilled lizard ( Chlamydosaurus kingii ), previously known only from mainland Australia, also in New Guinea occurs.

literature

• Kraig Adler (Ed.): Contributions to the History of Herpetology , Volume 3, Contributions to Herpetology Volume 29, Society for the study of amphibians and reptiles, 2012. ISBN 978-0-916984-82-3 . P. 200