Alpheus Hyatt

Alpheus Hyatt ( born April 5, 1838 in Washington, DC; † January 15, 1902 in Cambridge, Massachusetts) was an American zoologist and palaeontologist. He was next to Edward Drinker Cope one of the most famous American representative of Lamarckism.

Hyatt studied from 1856 to 1857 at Yale University, and from 1858 to 1862 under Louis Agassiz at Harvard University. Along with Addison Emery Verrill and Nathaniel Southgate Shaler, he examined in 1860 during the study period, the invertebrate fauna of the Atlantic coast. After his studies, he served from 1863 as a volunteer in the Civil War ( American Civil War).

In 1867 he married Audella Beebe. In the same year he went to Salem, Massachusetts and worked as a curator at the Peabody Essex Museum. From 1870 to 1888 he was professor of zoology and palaeontology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and from 1877 to 1902 professor of biology and zoology in the College of Arts and Sciences (formerly the College of Liberal Arts ) from Boston University.

Together with his colleague Jennie Maria Arms Sheldon he was also the first to describe the beak flies ( Mecoptera ) and mayflies ( Ephemeroptera). Hyatt was the father of U.S. American sculptor Anna Hyatt Huntington. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.

Publications

Some of his most important works:

• Observations on Polyzoa ( 1866-68 )
• On the Parallelism Between The Different Stages of the Life of the Individual and Those Of The Entire Group of the Molluscous order Tetribranehiata (1867 )
• Fossil Cephalopods of the Museum of Comparative Zoology; Embryology (1867 )
• Genera of Fossil Cephalopods ( 1883-84 )
• Evolution of the Cephalopoda (1884 )
• Bioplastology and the Belated Branches of Biological Research (1893 )