SAMUEL HUBBARD SCUDDER (1837-1911), PIONEERING ENTOMOLOGIST AND AMERICA’S FIRST SPECIALIST IN THE STUDY OF FOSSIL TERRESTRIAL ARTHROPODS (PALEOENTOMOLOGY, PALEOARACHNOLOGY, AND PALEOMYRIAPODOLOGY)

Samuel Hubbard Scudder was a leading figure in American entomology in the mid-to-late nineteenth century and the “Founding Father” of North American studies in fossil terrestrial arthropods. He is largely remembered today for his systematic work with lepidoptera (almost exclusively butterflies), “orthoptera” (which, at the time, included grasshoppers, cockroaches, and other insects), and fossil terrestrial arthropods (insects, arachnids, myriapods), yet his early contributions to entomology and paleontology extended far beyond systematics.

Scudder was a prolific writer, publishing 791 papers between 1858-1902, including such topics as insect biogeography, insect paleobiogeography, insect behavior, insect ontogeny and phylogeny, insect herbivory, insect songs, trace fossils, evolution, economic entomology, ethnology, general geology, and geography. His first paper on fossil insects was published in 1865 on the Devonian (now Carboniferous) Insects of New Brunswick, Canada. Scudder later published papers on fossil terrestrial arthropods of Green River, Mazon Creek, Florissant, and various other localities from North America and worldwide. His generally recognized masterwork of fossil terrestrial arthropod research was the two-volume set Fossil Insects of North America: The Pre-tertiary Insects (1890) (a collection of his previous papers on Paleozoic and Mesozoic insects) and The Tertiary Insects of North America (1890) (an original work). He also published comprehensive reviews of the then-known fossil cockroaches of the world (1879), Carboniferous cockroaches of the United States (1890, 1895), and fossil terrestrial arthropods of the world (1886, 1891). Another noteworthy publication was Scudder’s Nomenclator Zoologicus (1882-1884)—a comprehensive list of all generic and family names for then-known animals.

Scudder’s other contributions include: Curator, Librarian, Custodian, and President of the Boston Society of Natural History (1859-1870, 1880-1887); co-founder of the Cambridge Entomological Club and its journal Psyche (1874); General Secretary of the AAAS (1875); First editor of Science (1883-1885); USGS Paleontologist (1886-1892); Vice-President of AAAS (1894).

Scudder was a student of Mark Hopkins at Williams College and Louis Agassiz at Harvard University.