Alexander Wetmore

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See Alexander Wetmore in Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Alexander Wetmore (1886-1978), of the Smithsonian and the late dean of American Ornithology, was perhaps the most admired and influential figure in the field during the 20th Century. Wetmore served as Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution and Director of the Museum of Natural History until 1945, at which time the board of Regents elected him to the post of sixth Secretary of the Institution. From 1951 to 1955 Wetmore served as Home Secretary of the National Academy of Sciences.

Wetmore was a recipient of the American Ornithologists' Union's prestigious Brewster Medal and the Hubbard Medal of the National Geographic Society, awarded in 1975. Wetmore contributed an incaclculable amount of material to the collections of the ornithology department of the National Museum, including some 26,000 skins of birds the world over. It is no small exaggeration to state that the collections stored in the National Museum are the result of decades of field work on the behalf of Dr. Wetmore. In a similar vein, Wetmore described 189 species and subspecies of Neornithes, and revised countless taxonomic designation of avian paleospecies.

His systematic research spanned every conceivable avian taxon. In 1926 he described the first known presbyornithid material, though he attributed it to a sister taxon of Recurvirostridae. Wetmore single-handedly kept the discipline of paleornithology alive during the bleak years of the "modernist" era in which the subject received little attention, and as such, Wetmore was arguably the foremost expert on the fossil record of Aves in the world, at the time of his death. Wetmore's contributions to this field are impossible to duly credit, but among the most important was his phylogeny of Aves first presented in 1930, and later revised in 1951 and 1960. Virtually unchallenged for decades, it is still the cornerstone of most phylogenetic analyses of birds, which do not wholly or principally rely on molecular data (e.g., see Gill 1990). The 1976 Smithsonian volume Collected Papers in Avian Paleontology, edited by Olson, was dedicated to Wetmore.

An indication of the sentiment felt for the late Dr. Wetmore can be seen in the number of taxa named in his honor: 16 species and subsepecies of birds, four mammals, seven reptiles and amphibians, nine insects, five mollusks, a sponge, cactus, and even more impressive, Wetmore has a glacier and a canopy bridge in the Bayano River rainforest of Panama named after him.