Richard Lydekker

Richard Lydekker
Born (1849-07-25)25 July 1849
London, England
Died 16 April 1915(1915-04-16) (aged 65)
Harpenden, England
Nationality English
Fields
Institutions Trinity College, Cambridge
Natural History Museum
Notable awards Lyell Medal (1902)

Richard Lydekker (25 July 1849 – 16 April 1915) was an English naturalist, geologist and writer of numerous books on natural history.[1]

Biography

Map showing Lydekker's line in relation to those of Wallace and Weber, as well as the probable extent of land at the time of the Last Glacial Maximum, when the sea level was more than 110 m lower than today.

Richard Lydekker was born at Tavistock Square in London. His father was Gerard Wolfe Lydekker, a barrister-at-law with Dutch ancestry. The family moved to Harpenden Lodge soon after Richard's birth.[2] and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he took a first-class in the Natural Science tripos (1872).[3] In 1874 he joined the Geological Survey of India and made studies of the vertebrate paleontology of northern India (especially Kashmir). He remained in this post until the death of his father in 1881. His main work in India was on the Siwalik palaeofauna; it was published in Palaeontologia Indica. He was responsible for the cataloguing of the fossil mammals, reptiles and birds in the Natural History Museum (10 vols., 1891).[4]

He named a variety of taxa including the golden-bellied mangabey; as a taxon authority he is named simply as "Lydekker".[5]

Biogeography

He was influential in the science of biogeography. In 1895 he delineated the biogeographical boundary through Indonesia, known as Lydekker's Line, that separates Wallacea on the west from Australia-New Guinea on the east.[4] It follows the edge of the Sahul Shelf, an area from New Guinea to Australia of shallow water with the Aru Islands on its edge. Along with Wallace's Line and Huxley's Line it indicates the definite effect of geology on the biogeography of the region, something not seen so clearly in other parts of the world.[6]

First cuckoo

Lydekker attracted amused public attention with a pair of letters to The Times in 1913, when he wrote on 6 February that he had heard a cuckoo, contrary to Yarrell's History of British Birds which doubted the bird arrived before April. Six days later on 12 February 1913, he wrote again, confessing that "the note was uttered by a bricklayer's labourer". Letters about the first cuckoo became a tradition in the newspaper.[7]

Awards

He received the Lyell Medal from the Geological Society of London in 1902.[8]

Works

Actiniaria by Giacomo Merculiano, 1893, in Lydekker's The Royal Natural History
Golden eagle bringing prey to the aerie, in The Royal Natural History, signed by Joseph Wolf

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ "Lydekker, Richard". Who's Who. Vol. 59. 1907. p. 1096.
  2. ↑ "Obituary". Ibis. 57 (3): 617–620. 1915. doi:10.1111/j.1474-919X.1915.tb08208.x.
  3. ↑ "Lydekker, Richard (LDKR867R)". A Cambridge Alumni Database. University of Cambridge.
  4. 1 2  Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1922). "Lydekker, Richard". Encyclopædia Britannica (12th ed.). London & New York.
  5. ↑ "Cercocebus chrysogaster". IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. IUCN. Retrieved 15 July 2015.
  6. ↑ Gillespie, Rosemary G.; Clague, D. A. (2009). Encyclopedia of Islands. University of California Press. p. 447. ISBN 978-0-520-25649-1.
  7. ↑ Gregory, Kenneth (1976). First Cuckoo: Letters to "The Times", 1900-75. Allen & Unwin.
  8. ↑ "The Geological Society of London". The Times (36699). London. 24 February 1902. p. 6.
  9. ↑ "Catalog Record: Phases of animal life, past and present - Hathi Trust Digital Library". hathitrust.org.
  10. ↑ "Catalog Record: The royal natural history - Hathi Trust Digital Library". hathitrust.org.
  11. ↑ "The Royal Natural History". Archive.org. Retrieved 2012-06-12.
  12. ↑ "Catalog Record: The wild animals of India, Burma, Malaya, and... - Hathi Trust Digital Library". hathitrust.org.
  13. ↑ "Living races of mankind : a popular illustrated account of the customs, habits, pursuits, feasts, and ceremonies of the races of mankind throughout the world : Hutchinson, H. N. (Henry Neville), 1856-1927 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive". Internet Archive.
  14. ↑ "Living races of mankind : a popular illustrated account of the customs, habits, pursuits, feasts, and ceremonies of the races of mankind throughout the world : Hutchinson, H. N. (Henry Neville), 1856-1927 : Free Download & Streaming : Internet Archive". Internet Archive.
  15. ↑ "Catalog Record: The game animals of Africa - Hathi Trust Digital Library". hathitrust.org.
  16. ↑ Lydekker, Richard, 1849-1915. "Details - Animal portraiture / - Biodiversity Heritage Library". biodiversitylibrary.org.
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