George S. Myers
George Sprague Myers ( born February 2, 1905 in Jersey City, † 4 November 1985 ) was an American zoologist and ichthyologist.
In his native Jersey City, he attended the Primary School and the High School, interrupted by a year at St. John's Military School in Ossining. Even as a youth he was interested in fish and amphibians, and published in 1920, at the age of 15 years, his first post in a aquarium trade magazine. The American Museum of Natural History in New York became one of his favorite places. There he learned the herpetologists Gladwyn Kingsley Noble and his young assistant Karl Patterson Schmidt know. From 1922-24 Myers worked as a volunteer in the laboratory of Noble and published about 30 works on aquariums and ichthyology. In 1924, he met the famous ichthyologist Carl H. Eigenmann of Indiana University know who encouraged him to enroll at Indiana University and helped him in financing the study through a part -time job as assistant curator for the fish collection. In the fall of 1926, Myers moved to Stanford University where he studied with the well-known ichthyologist David Starr Jordan, Charles Henry Gilbert, John Otterbein Snyder and Edwin Chapin Starks. 1930 received his Bachelor of Arts. His doctoral thesis was on the systematics of the African egg-laying tooth carp ( today Nothobranchiidae ) and the global spread of egg-laying tooth carp.
He landed his first job at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, where he assistant - curator and the head of the fish department was. He took care of there at the fish collection that was not edited for 40 years and published at this time more than 200 publications. In 1936, Myers as an assistant professor of biology and curator of the zoological collections back to Stanford. There he taught systematic ichthyology, the vertebrate paleontology, biogeography and systematic herpetology. In 1938, at the age of 33 and only two years after appointment Stanford George Myers was appointed full professor for five years after his graduation.
Myers worked intensively on biogeography, was a supporter of Alfred Wegener's theory of continental drift and stood against the Permanenztheorie, the outdated assumption that has the distribution of continents and oceans on the Earth basically not changed.
During the Great Depression and the Second World War, Myers spent nearly two and a half years in Brazil and worked for a program of the U.S. State Department's good U.S. relations with Latin America to promote. During this time he collected and studied fish and frogs and quickly established itself as one of the leading experts in the field of South American ichthyology, herpetology and biogeography. He stayed 34 years at Stanford University, has published more than 600 publications and sometimes works in the editorial offices of various scientific, ichthyological and aquaristischer journals.
After his retirement on 31 August 1970, he was Visiting Professor of Ichthyology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University, and half the year in Cambridge, the other at home in his house in Scotts Valley, California.
Myers was married four times. With Martha Ruth Frisinger, his first wife, he has two sons.