Adolf Bernhard Meyer

Adolf Bernhard Meyer

Adolf Bernhard Meyer (11 October 1840, Hamburg – 22 August 1911, Dresden) was a German anthropologist, ornithologist, entomologist, and herpetologist.

Biography

Meyer was educated at the universities of Göttingen, Vienna, Zürich and Berlin. He became director of the Anthropological and Ethnographic Museum in Dresden in 1874 and continued in that position until his retirement in 1905. He travelled in the East Indies at the end of the nineteenth century.

The brown sicklebill (Epimachus meyeri) was named after him when the species was discovered in 1884. He published a classification of birds, among them the Carola's parotia (Parotia carolae), the Stephanie's astrapia (Astrapia stephaniae), the red-capped flowerpecker (Dicaeum geelvinkianum), and the takahe (Porphyrio hochstetteri).

In addition to birds he made a study on primates. He gave the binomial name Tarsius sangirensis to the Sangihe tarsier, a small primate found in Indonesia in 1897.

Meyer's East Indies bird collection and beetles and butterflies collected in Celebes and New Guinea are in Staatliches Museum für Tierkunde Dresden.

He also studied amphibians and reptiles, describing several new species of lizards endemic to New Guinea.^[1]

Writings

• Abbildungen von Vogelskeletten (1879–95)
• Publikationen des königlichenethnographischen Museums zu Dresden (1881–1903)
• Album von Philippinentypen (1885–1904)
• The Birds of Celebes (1885)
• The Distribution of Negritos (1899)
• Studies of the Museum (of Natural History) and kindred Institutions of New York, etc. (1905)
• Amerikanische Bibliotheken und ihre Bestrebungen (1906)
• Römerstadt Agunt (1908)

Notes

References

• NIE
•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Rines, George Edwin, ed. (1920). "Meyer, Adolf Bernhard". Encyclopedia Americana.