Ron Scarlett
Ron Scarlett MBE (actually Ronald Jack Scarlett, born March 22, 1911 in Stoke near Nelson, † July 9, 2002 in Christchurch ) was a New Zealand Paläozoologe.
Life and work
Ron Scarlett came as the son of Walter Andrew and his wife Lilian Elsie Scarlett (nee Creswell ) to the world. He had three younger brothers and four younger sisters. His father was an impoverished sawyer. In order to find work in the sawmills, the family was forced to several parades in the north of the South Island. Ron Scarlett attended six elementary schools, before he started working at the age of 14 years. He jobte on a farm, in a sawmill, as a laborer, as a greenkeeper on a golf course, as a gardener, as a laborer in a gold mine and later as a truck driver for the coal industry. At the age of almost 27 years, he enrolled in the Canterbury University College, where he graduated a few years later for a Bachelor of Arts. Subsequently, he studied anthropology at Henry Devenish Skinner. In addition, he finished with William John Harris seminars in librarianship. However, Scarlett's great passion was paleontology and so he accompanied in the 1940s, Roger Duff, who was director of the Canterbury Museum at the time, to excavations in the Pyramid Valley. In 1949 he assisted Jim Eyles, the former director of the Nelson Provincial Museum, for three months during exposure of Moa fossils. In 1950 he became a permanent employee at the Canterbury Museum and was responsible for the inventory of the collections. In the aftermath Scarlett was one of the most prolific osteologists New Zealand. Special recognition he gained through his excavations in the fossil deposits Te Aute Lake Poukawa and Pyramid Valley, where he promoted the subfossil remains of an extinct Late Quaternary avifauna, including the Eyles - ordination of New Zealand cave Schwalm, Malacorhynchus Scarletti and the New Zealand cesspool chicken days. Ron Scarlett was one of the founders in 1954 of the New Zealand Archaeological Association. He was also a member of the Ornithological Society of New Zealand, for which he wrote frequently scientific contributions in the quarterly journal Notornis. Scarlett died on 9 July 2002 at the age of 91 years at a hospital in Christchurch.
Honors and Dedikationsnamen
Ron Scarlett received the 1996 for his scientific merits of the Order Member of the British Empire. In 1994, Richard N. Holdaway and Trevor H. Worthy of extinct Sturmtaucherart Puffinus spelaeus the trivial names Scarlett's Shearwater.