Pierce Brodkorb

William Pierce Brodkorb ( born September 29, 1908 in Chicago, Illinois, † July 18, 1992 in Gainesville, Florida) was an American paleontologist and ornithologists.

Life and work

With 16 Brodkorb learned at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, the preparation of birds. In 1930 he completed his studies at the University of Illinois. The following two years Brodkorb birds collected in Idaho and groomed them on behalf of Harry Church Oberholser for the Cleveland Museum of Natural History in Cleveland, Ohio. In July 1931, he married Edna Carleton, who accompanied him on many trips. 1940, the only daughter was born. In 1976, the marriage ended in divorce.

1933 Brodkorb wrote to the University of Michigan and a doctorate in 1936 for Ph.D.. Soon after, he became an assistant curator at the Museum at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Michigan. He undertook several expeditions that took him to the Bermuda Islands and in 1937, 1939 and 1941 into southern Mexico. About his fieldwork in Mexico, he published in 1943 the monograph Birds of the Gulf Lowlands of Southern Mexico. After the Second World War he joined in 1946 to a position as an assistant professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville, which he held until his retirement in December 1989.

In the early 1950s, Brodkorb specialized on fossil birds. He amassed a huge collection of bird fossils from Florida, which are dated to the Miocene, Pliocene and the Pleistocene. This collection includes 12,500 bird skeletons from 129 families and is kept in the Florida Museum of Natural History, a department of the University of Florida. Brodkorb 1960, in his book How Many Species of Birds Have Existed? hypothesized that since the Cretaceous 1.634 million birds would have existed on Earth. This assumption, however, was dismissed by other scientists such as James Fisher as exaggerated, the number estimated in turn to less than 500,000 species. From 1963 to 1978 Brodkorb published the five -volume work Catalogue of Fossil Birds. In 1982 he became an honorary member of the Florida Ornithological Society.

Brodkorb described several prehistoric bird species, including Alexornis and Titanis and the family Idiornithidae. Taxa as Paraptenodytes brodkorbi, Aegolius acadicus brodkorbi, Empidonax fulvifrons brodkorbi and Henocitta brodkorbi were named after him.