Emmett Reid Dunn

Life and work

Emmett Reid Dunn was the son of civil engineer Emmett Clarke and his wife, Mary Cassandra ( Reid ) Dunn. After graduating as a Bachelor of Arts in 1915 and Master of Arts in 1916 at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, he served from 1917 to 1918 as an ensign in the U.S. Navy. In 1919 he was assistant at the United States National Museum. In 1921 he earned his doctorate at Harvard University for Ph.D. He then served as a professor of zoology at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. From 1924 to 1929 he was editor of the journal Copeia. In 1928 he gave up his professor post at Smith College and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, which he conducted research in the American tropics and in European museums. In 1929 he was associate professor at Haverford College. From 1930 to 1931 he was president of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists. From 1935 to 1956 he held the David Scull - Chair of Biology at Haverford College. In 1937 he was curator of reptiles and amphibians at the Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia. From 1946 to 1956 he was a research associate at the American Museum of Natural History. Already in 1916 and 1926 he did field research for this museum. Dunn undertook extensive expeditions that led him to Komodo, Mexico, Panama, Costa Rica, Colombia, Jamaica, Cuba and South America. His research focus was on the salamander of eastern North America, of which he in 1925 his most famous work " Salamanders of the Family Plethodontidae " wrote. Further publications were " Reptile and Amphibian collections from the North Carolina Mountains: with especial Reference to Salamanders " (1917 ), "The American Caecilians " (1942 ), " Lower Categories in Herpetology " (1943) and "Contributions to the Herpetology of Colombia, 1943-1946 "(1957). In addition, Dunn wrote more than 217 scientific articles for the journal Copeia and discovered 40 new species of reptiles and Amphibientaxa, including the Panama Stummelfußfrosch, De Looking lake anaconda, the Black Milk Snake ( Lampropeltis triangulum gaigae ) and the long-tailed rattlesnake.

Dunn was a member of the American Society of Mammalogists, the Ecological Society of America, the Society for the Study of Evolution, the Reptile Study Society, the Phi Beta Kappa, the Academia Colombiana de Ciencias, the Biological Society of Washington, the Harvard Travellers Club and The Explorers Club.