Tom Iredale

Tom Iredale (born March 24, 1880 in Stainburn , Cumberland (England) , † April 12, 1972 in Harbord , Australia ) was a British-Australian ornithologist and malacologist .

Tom Iredale

Iredale was a self-taught zoologist, but was an avid ornithologist (and egg collector) even as a teenager. He completed an apprenticeship as a pharmacist in England and traveled to New Zealand in 1901 to cure his tuberculosis . In New Zealand he was a company employee at Henry Berry & Co. in Christchurch and married in 1906. On the Kermadec Islands , where he lived for eleven months with four others in 1908, he observed birds and collected mussels and snails. In 1909 he returned to England via Australia, where he was a freelancer at the Natural History Museum and worked on the book Birds of Australia (12 volumes, London 1910 to 1927) by Gregory Mathews (1876-1949). Much of what Mathews published was actually by Iredale, together they only published the first and only volume of the Manual of the Birds of Australia in 1921 . He was supported by wealthy naturalists such as Charles Rothschild (1877-1923), an entomologist whom he accompanied to Hungary to collect bird fleas. In 1923 he married Lillian Marguerite Medland (1880–1955), who also contributed illustrations of birds to his publications and those of other authors. In 1923 he returned to Australia, where he held positions in the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union (RAOU) and from 1924 became a conchologist and curator at the Australian Museum in Sydney, whose mollusc collection he greatly expanded. In 1944 he retired there, but remained a volunteer.

He published numerous articles, some under a pseudonym (like Garrio). As a zoologist, he was controversial because he never corrected himself.

Numerous first descriptions of Australian snails come from him (see for example Camaenidae ) and many taxa are named after him.

From 1931 he was a fellow of the Royal Zoological Society of New South Wales, whose president he was 1937/38. In 1959 he received the Clarke Medal from the Royal Society of New South Wales.

Fonts

• with Gregory Mathews: A manual of the birds of Australia, Volume 1, Whitherby, 1921 (Orders Casuarii to Columbae, illustrations by Lilian Medland)
• with AF Basset Hull: Monograph of the Australian loricates, Volume 1, 1923
• Birds of Paradise and Bower Birds, Melbourne, 1950
• Birds of New Guinea, 2 volumes, Melbourne, 1956

literature

• Tess Kloot, Australian Dictionary of Biography, Online
• Biography, Encyclopedia of Australian Science