Ron Scarlett

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Ron Scarlett MBE (actually Ronald Jack Scarlett ; born March 22, 1911 in Stoke near Nelson , † July 9, 2002 in Christchurch ) was a New Zealand paleozoologist .

Live and act

Ron Scarlett was born to Walter Andrew and his wife Lilian Elsie Scarlett (née Creswell). He had three younger brothers and four younger sisters. His father was an impoverished sawmill . In order to find work in the sawmills, the family was forced to move several times in the north of the South Island . Ron Scarlett attended six elementary schools before starting work at the age of 14. He worked on a farm, in a sawmill, as a laborer, as a greenkeeper on a golf course, as a gardener, as a worker in a gold mine and later as a truck driver for the coal mining industry . At the age of nearly 27, he enrolled in Canterbury University College, where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts a few years later . He then studied anthropology with Henry Devenish Skinner . He also took classes in library science with William John Harris . Scarlett's great passion, however, was paleontology and so he accompanied Roger Duff , who was director of the Canterbury Museum at the time , on excavations in the Pyramid Valley in the 1940s . In 1949 he assisted Jim Eyles , then director of the Nelson Provincial Museum , for three months in uncovering Moa fossils. In 1950 he became a permanent employee of the Canterbury Museum and was entrusted with the inventory of the collections. In the following years Scarlett became one of the most distinguished osteologists in New Zealand. He gained particular fame through his excavations in the fossil deposits Te Aute, Lake Poukawa and Pyramid Valley, where he unearthed the subfossil remains of an extinct late Quaternary avifauna , including the Eyles harrier , the New Zealand cave hawk , Malacorhynchus scarletti and the New Zealand grouse . Ron Scarlett was a co-founder of the New Zealand Archaeological Association in 1954 . He was also a member of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand , for which he frequently contributed to the quarterly journal Notornis . Scarlett died on July 9, 2002 at the age of 91 in a Christchurch hospital.

Honors and Dedication Names

Ron Scarlett received the Order of Member of the British Empire in 1996 for his scientific merits . In 1994 Richard N. Holdaway and Trevor H. Worthy gave the extinct shearwater species Puffinus spelaeus the common name Scarlett's Shearwater.

Works (selection)

  • 1972: Bones for the New Zealand Archaeologist
  • 1979: Birds of a Feather: Osteological and Archaeological Papers from the South Pacific in honor of RJ Scarlett
  • 1987: Bird Species Present on the Southwest Coast of Chatham Island in the 16th Century AD
  • 1990: The Naval Good Shooting Medal, 1903-1914
  • 1992: Under Hazardous Circumstances: Register of Awards of Lloyd's War Medal for Bravery at Sea 1939–1945

literature

  • Ornithological Society of New Zealand (Ed.): Notornis - Journal of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand . Volume 21 Part 1, March 1974 (English). On-line. (PDF (5.0 MB)) Archived from the original on October 16, 2008 ; accessed on September 9, 2014 (English, original website no longer available).

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Scarlett, Ron
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Scarlett, Ronald Jack (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION New Zealand paleozoologist
DATE OF BIRTH March 22, 1911
PLACE OF BIRTH Stoke at Nelson
DATE OF DEATH July 9, 2002
Place of death Christchurch