William Thomas Calman

William Thomas Calman (born December 29, 1871 in Dundee , † September 29, 1959 in Carshalton , Surrey ) was a British zoologist.

Calman attended school in Dundee, where he met D'Arcy Wentworth Thompson , whose laboratory assistant he became, which enabled him to study at Dundee University for free. In 1895 he made his bachelor's degree with distinction in botany, zoology and physiology and became an assistant lecturer and demonstrator at the university. In 1900 he received his doctorate (D. Sc.). He was considered an excellent teacher and represented Thompson in his lectures. In 1903 he became an employee at the British Museum , where he became assistant curator for crustaceans and woodlouse spiders (Pycnogonida) from 1904. In 1921 he was Deputy Keeper for Zoology and in 1927 Keeper for Zoology as the successor to Tate Regan . He has also been an external examiner at many UK universities. In 1936 he retired and moved to Tayport . During World War II he taught again at Queen's College in Dundee and at the University of St Andrews .

In 1909 he published the volume Crustaceen for the Treatise on Zoology by Edwin Ray Lankester (who invited him in 1901), which became a standard work and fundamental for their systematics. Calman introduced the taxa Eucarida , Peracarida and Hoplocarida . He named numerous other taxa of crustaceans. He processed the findings of the Siboga Expedition (1899-1900), the British Antarctic Terra Nova Expedition (1910) and the expedition of John Murray (1933/34).

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society (1921) and the Royal Society of Edinburgh (1937) and an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews. From 1934 to 1937 he was President of the Linnean Society (and from 1923 to 1928 its zoological secretary), whose Linnean Medal he received in 1946. From 1919 to 1946 he was secretary of the Ray Society and edited their monographs. In 1935 he became Companion of the Order of the Bath (CB). For many years he worked on the arachnids and crustaceans for the Zoological Record.

Fonts

• Appendiculata: Crustacea, in Lankester: Treatise on Zoology, 1909
• The life of the Crustacea 1911
• The classification of animals 1949

literature

• Frederick R. Schram: The British School, Calman, Cannon and Manton and their effect in Carcinology in the English speaking World, in: Frank Truesdale (editor): History of Carcinology, Balkema 1993, 321-348
• Anita McConnell, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography , 2004