Guy Musser
Guy Graham Musser ( born August 10, 1936 in Salt Lake City, Utah) is an American zoologist. He discovered and described many new taxa of Altweltmäuse ( Murinae ).
Life and work
Musser attended primary and secondary schools until 1955. 1967 he received his doctorate with a thesis on the systematics of Rotbauchhörnchens (Sciurus aureogaster ) for Ph.D. In 1966 he joined the staff at the American Museum of Natural History, where he took the place of the mammal curator department. Since his retirement in 2002 he has been Curator Emeritus. In the 1960s and 1970s, he has written numerous scientific articles on croissants, New world and Altweltmäuse. In the 1970s, he led a three -year expedition to Sulawesi where he discovered several new mice and rat species.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Musser published some of his most important works, including Notes on systematics of Indo- Malayan murid rodents, and descriptions of new genera and species from Ceylon, Sulawesi, and the Philippines ( 1981), The giant rat of Flores and its relatives east of Borneo and Bali ( 1981), Crunomys and the small -bodied shrew rats native to the Philippine Islands and Sulawesi ( Celebes ) (1982) and Malaysian mureeds and the giant rat of Sumatra (1983, together with Cameron Newcomb ). This work led to a revision in the scheme of the Asian Altweltmäuse and the splitting of the genus Rattus into several new genera. Later, he wrote numerous articles on various Altweltmäuse of Asia and Australasia as well as 1998, a revision within the subfamily Sigmodontinae, a group of South American rodents of the family Cricetidae.
Musser is one of the authors of the reference book Mammal Species of the World (1993 and 2005), where he co-authored with Michael D. Carlton, the chapter on the order of rodents. In addition, he frequently wrote for the Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History. Guy Musser is married to Mary Ellen Holden, a zoologist and director of the upper primary level ( Upper Elementary ) a Christian school in Charleston, South Carolina. They have three children and live on James Iceland, South Carolina.
Guy Musser was in 1992 awarded the Clinton Hart Merriam Award from the American Society of Mammalogists. According to him, the extinct giant rat Coryphomys musseri is named.