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Dr. R. E. Snodgrass
Robert Evans Snodgrass (R.E. Snodgrass) (July 5, 1875 - September 4, 1962) was an American entomologist and artist who made important contributions to the fields of arthropod morphology, anatomy, e...view moreRobert Evans Snodgrass (R.E. Snodgrass) (July 5, 1875 - September 4, 1962) was an American entomologist and artist who made important contributions to the fields of arthropod morphology, anatomy, evolution, and metamorphosis. He was the author of 76 scientific articles and six books, including Insects, Their Ways and Means of Living (1930) and the book considered to be his crowning achievement, the Principles of Insect Morphology (1935).
Born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1875, the oldest of three children of James Cathcart Snodgrass and Annie Elizabeth Evans Snodgrass, his early interests in zoology were piqued by frequent visits to the St. Louis Zoo. At age 15, the family moved to a 20-acre ranch in Ontario, California, where he entered a Methodist preparatory school at the high school level, studying Latin, Greek, French, German, physics, chemistry, and drawing. The teaching of biological evolution was forbidden at the time, but Snodgrass educated himself by reading Darwin, Huxley and Spencer in his free time. He entered Stanford University in 1895, aged 20, studying general zoology, entomology (with Dr. Vernon Lyman Kellogg), entomology (with then Stanford president Dr. David Starr Jordan), ichthyology, and comparative vertebrate anatomy, and graduated with his A.B. degree in Zoology in 1901.
His first opportunity to conduct research arose from Dr. Kellogg, who set him to work on the biting lice (Mallophaga). During this time, he also participated in his first two field expeditions, the first to the Pribilof Islands led by Dr. Jordan, and the second to the Galapagos Islands, led by Edmund Heller. Dr. Snodgrass published seven papers with Heller regarding organisms collected during the Galapagos expedition.
He was awarded the 1961 Leidy Award from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.
Dr. Snodgrass died in 1962, aged 87.view less