Roy W. McDiarmid

Roy Wallace McDiarmid (born February 18, 1940 in Santa Monica , California ) is an American herpetologist .

Life

McDiarmid grew up in Whittier , California. As a youth he collected amphibians and snakes and kept exotic pets, including South American coatis and slow loris .

After completing his bachelor's degree in 1961, he graduated from the University of Southern California with a Master of Science degree in 1966 with the thesis A study in biogeography: The herpetofauna of the Pacific lowlands of western Mexico . In 1968 he was at the same university with a thesis on comparative morphology and evolution of the neotropical frog genera Atelopus, dendrophryniscus, Melanophryniscus, Oreophrynella and Brachycephalus for Ph.D. PhD .

McDiarmid has spent most of his research career in the systematics, behavior, ecology, and biogeography of amphibians and reptiles in the Neotropics , and has published more than 150 scientific articles and several books, including the Snake Species of the World. A Taxonomic and Geographic Reference (with Jonathan A. Campbell and T'Shaka A. Toure), Measuring and Monitoring Biological Diversity: Standard Methods for Amphibians (with Ronald Heyer and Maureen A. Donnelly), Tadpoles: The Biology of Anuran Larvae (with Ronald Altig), Handbook of Larval Amphibians of the United States and Canada (with Ronald Altig) and Reptile Biodiversity .

His early work focused on the herpetofauna in the dry forests of western Mexico, including a project with the Museo de Zoologia of the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico , where he worked on newly discovered frog species and their tadpoles. As part of an Organization for Tropical Studies (OTS) program, he first studied the wet forest habitats in Costa Rica in 1966, and since then he has carried out most of his field studies in the tropics . McDiarmid organized and directed several courses in the OTS program in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and after a brief stint at the University of Chicago , he moved to Tampa and became a faculty member at the University of South Florida , teaching from 1968 to 1978 . During that time he chaired a subcommittee of the Florida Committee on Rare and Endangered Plants and Animals, which published the book Rare and Endangered Biota of Florida 3: Amphibians and Reptiles in 1979 .

In 1976 McDiarmid went to Ecuador for half a year to do a program in tropical ecology for the University of South Florida . In 1978 he moved to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, where he was a curator at the National Museum of Natural History. Since 2008 he has been a retired scientist at the Patuxent Wildlife Research Center of the United States Geological Survey .

McDiarmid was one of the first to describe the reptile species Anolis neblininus (1993), Arthrosaura synaptolepis (1992), Atractus heyeri (2015), Bachia pyburni (1998), Mitophis asbolepis (1985), Mitophis calypso (1985) and Mitophis leptipileptus (1985). In 2007 he established the genus Nymphargus from the family of glass frogs (Centrolenidae).

Dedication names and honors

After McDiarmid, the frog species Allobates mcdiarmidi and Rulyrana mcdiarmidi and the dwarf species Oreosaurus mcdiarmidi are named. In 2013 he received the Fitch Award .

literature

• Matthew C. Perry; Washington Biologists 'Field Club (Ed.): The Washington Biologists' Field Club: Its Members and its History (1900-2006) . Washington, DC 2007, ISBN 978-0-615-16259-1 , pp. 169–171 ( usgs.gov [PDF]).
• Roy Wallace McDiarmid. American Men & Women of Science: A Biographical Directory of Today's Leaders in Physical, Biological, and Related Sciences, Gale, 2008. Biography In Context, accessed July 9, 2018.

Web links

• Profile Roy W. McDiarmid at the United States Geological Survey
• Bibliography at Google Scholar