Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell

In this 1935 photograph, botanist Wilmatte Porter Cockerell (1871-1957) is shown with biologist Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell (1866-1948), whom she married in 1900. In 1901, he named the ultramarine blue chromodorid Mexichromis porterae in her honor. Before and after their marriage in 1900, they frequently went on collecting expeditions together and assembled a large private library of natural history films, which they showed to schoolchildren and public audiences to promote the cause of environmental conservation.

Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell (1866–1948) was an American zoologist, born at Norwood, England, and brother of Sydney Cockerell. He was educated at the Middlesex Hospital Medical School, and then studied botany in the field in Colorado in 1887-90.

Professional life

Between 1891 and 1901 Cockerell was curator of the public museum of Kingston, Jamaica, professor of entomology of the New Mexico Agricultural Experiment Station. In 1900-03 he was instructor in biology at the New Mexico Normal University; in 1903-04 curator of the Colorado College Museum; and in 1904 he became lecturer on entomology and in 1906 professor of systematic zoology, at the University of Colorado, where he worked with Junius Henderson in establishing the University of Colorado Museum of Natural History. During World War II he operated the Desert Museum in Palm Springs, California.

Publications

Cockerell was author of more than 2,200 articles in scientific publications, especially on the Hymenoptera, Hemiptera, and Mollusca, and on paleontology and various phases of evolution, plus some 1700 additional authored works, including treatises on social reform and education. He was one of the most prolific taxonomists in history, publishing descriptions of over 9,000 species and genera of insects alone, some 6,400 of which were bees, and some 1,000 mollusks, arachnids, fungi, mammals, fish and plants. This includes descriptions of numerous fossil taxa, such as the landmark study, Some Fossil Insects from Florissant, Colorado (1913).

Honors

A dorm in the Engineering Quad at the University of Colorado at Boulder is named in his honor.

Taxa

Taxa named by Cockerell include:

• Elisolimax Cockerell, 1893 (A land snail genus)
• Tortrix? destructus Cockerell, 1917 (Late Eocene, Florrisant Formation, Colorado)
• Tortrix? florissantana Cockerell, 1907 (Late Eocene, Florrisant Formation, Colorado)

References

This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.

External links

• Biography of Cockerell
• Works by or about Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• GAP Biography
• Works by Theodore Dru Alison Cockerell at Internet Archive