Richard E. Blackwelder

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Richard Eliot Blackwelder (born January 29, 1909 in Madison , Wisconsin , † January 17, 2001 ) was an American entomologist who also dealt with general questions of taxonomy .

Life

Blackwelder received his bachelor's degree from Stanford University in 1931 and received his doctorate there in 1934 with Gordon Floyd Ferris (1893-1958) and Robert Evans Snodgrass with a dissertation on ruff (Staphylinidae). He then collected over 50,000 beetles and other insects in the Caribbean from 1935 to 1938 for the Smithsonian Institution . He was then initially at the Bureau of Entomology of the United States Department of Agricultural and from 1938 Assistant Curator for Entomology at the American Museum of Natural History . From 1940 he was Assistant and then Associate Curator of the Smithsonian Institution at the National Museum of Natural History . From 1956 to 1958 he taught as an associate professor at St John Fisher College in Rochester (New York) and from 1958 he was at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, where he became professor of zoology in 1965 and retired in 1977.

From 1944 to 1957 he compiled a list of 50,000 beetles from Central America, South America, and the Caribbean. He first described numerous taxa.

He was also known as a collector of material on JRR Tolkien and his fantastic novels. His related collection went to the Tolkien Collection of Marquette University , which also keeps the original manuscripts of Tolkien's most famous works.

In 1961 he was President of the Society of Systematic Zoology, in the establishment of which by Waldo L. Schmidt (1887-1977) and George W. Wharton (1914-1990) he was also involved in 1947 and where he was editor of Systematic Zoology .

Fonts

On entomology and taxonomy:

  • Monograph of the West Indian beetles of the family Staphylinidae. Bulletin of the United States National Museum No. 182, 1943
  • Checklist of the Coleopterous insects of Mexico, Central America, the West Indies, and South America. USNM Bull. 185, 1944-1957
  • Generic names of the beetle family Staphylinidae with an essay on genotypy. Bull. US Nat. Mus. 200, 1952
  • Fourth Supplement to the Leng Catalog of Coleoptera of America: North of Mexico, Sherman 1939
  • Animal taxonomy and the new systematics, Surv. Biol. Progr., 4, 1962, 1-57
  • Taxonomy; A text and reference book New York, John Wiley 1967

About Tolkien and others:

  • The Zest for Life, or Waldo Had a Pretty Good Run: The Life of Waldo LaSalle Schmitt The Allen Press, Inc., Lawrence, Kansas, 1979
  • A Tolkien Thesaurus, Garland Publishing, New York, 1990
  • Tolkien Phraseology: A Companion to A Tolkien Thesaurus Tolkien Archives Fund, Marquette University, 1990

literature

  • Wayne G. Hammond, Christina Scull (Eds.): The Lord of the Rings 1954-2004: Scholarship in Honor of Richard E. Blackwelder Marquette University Press, 2006, ISBN 0-87462-018-X .

Web links

Commons : Richard E. Blackwelder  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

References and comments

  1. ↑ Published as: Morphology of the Coleopterous Family Staphylinidae. Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections 94, 1936, pp. 1-102
  2. ^ Blackwelder, Field Notebooks 1935-1938, Smithsonian Institution
  3. ^ Marquette University Library, Tolkien Collection
personal data
SURNAME Blackwelder, Richard E.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Blackwelder, Richard Eliot
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American entomologist
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1909
PLACE OF BIRTH Madison , Wisconsin
DATE OF DEATH January 17, 2001