Valerie Todd Davies

Valerie Ethel Todd Davies (born September 29, 1920 in Makirikiri near Wanganui , New Zealand ; died 2012 in Brisbane , Queensland ) was a New Zealand zoologist with a focus on arachnology who described numerous species of spiders .

life and work

Davies was born in New Zealand in 1920 as the third of four daughters to the sheep farmer James and his wife Ethel Todd. She completed her school career in Wanganui and then went to study zoology at Victoria University in Wellington and the University of Otago in Dunedin , where she did her master's degree on trapdoor spiders with BJ Marples in 1943 . Your promotion she made at Somerville College of Oxford University in the UK back to the end of World War II and returned to Dunedin in 1948 where she married the dentist George Davies, who in the New Zealand Army Dental Corps served. When he received a professorship at the University of Queensland in 1963 , they moved to Brisbane, where Valerie first worked as a part-time tutor in the university's zoology department, and in 1972 got a position as curator of arachnology at the Queensland Museum .

At the Queensland Museum, Davies expanded the arachnological collection and made regular collecting trips to the rainforests. She was a participant in the Australian Biological Resources Study (ABRS) species recordings from 1975 to 1977 and participated in the Earthwatch Bellenden Ker Expedition in 1982 and the Hinchinbrook Island Wanderlust Expedition in 1984. During her work she described more than 100 new species of spiders and other taxa , including 17 genera and in 1980 the Malkaridae family . She retired in 1985 but continued to work for the museum for almost 20 years. Her husband George died in 2010 and they had three children with him: Christopher, John and Rosemary.

Honors

The spider genus Toddiana and 15 new spider species, including Austrarchaea daviesae , were named after her . In 1988 she was awarded the Queensland Museum Medal and in 2010 she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society of Arachnology . She has been a member of the International Federation of University Women since studying at Oxford and was later on the Rhodes Scholarship Selection Committee .

supporting documents

1. ↑ ^{a b} Valerie Ethel (Todd) Davies , biography at the Entomological Society of Queensland; accessed on July 15, 2016.
2. ↑ ^{a b c d} Rosemary Davies: Leading light in world of arachnids. The Sydney Morning Herald, Jan. 7, 2013; accessed on July 15, 2016.