Richard Meinertzhagen - Zoology

Zoology

"From boyhood on had been in tune with nature; he took photographs, made drawings and provided armchair tourists with keen descriptions of rain forests and snowy mountains ... and discovered new (previously unrecorded) species of bats, birds, and mallophaga (bird lice)." He became a chairman of the British Ornithologists' Club and a recipient of a Godman-Salvin Medal; the British Museum (Natural History) named a room after him.

Meinertzhagen "first achieved a sliver of international fame when he discovered, killed, stuffed, and shipped back to London the first known to Europeans Giant African Forest Hog, soon dubbed Hylochoerus meinertzhageni, and attributed to Richard Meinertzhagen." At that time, while on active duty in 1903, he was "fearlessly exploring and mapping areas no European had seen before." He later also discovered the Afghan Snowfinch or Montifringilla theresae, and the Moroccan Riparia rupestris theresae and named them, and ten others, after Theresa Clay.

He edited Nicoll's Birds of Egypt in 1930. Michael J. Nicoll was a friend and Assistant Director of the Zoological Gardens at Giza; Nicoll attempted to write a comprehensive guide to the ornithology of Egypt, but died in 1925 before it could be published. The work was finished by Meinertzhagen with contributions of his own independent research and illustrations. It was printed with the title "that seems appropriate," "Nicoll's Birds of Egypt by Col. R. Meinertzhagen."

In 1948-1949, he was accompanied by Dr. Phillip Clancey on an ornithological expedition to Arabia, Yemen, Aden, Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, and South Africa.

As the author of numerous taxonomic and other works on birds, and possessing a vast collection of bird and bird lice specimens, Meinertzhagen was long considered one of Britain's greatest ornithologists. Yet his magnum opus, Birds of Arabia (1954), is believed to have been based on the unpublished manuscript of another naturalist, George Bates, who is not sufficiently credited in that book.

In the 1990s an analysis of Meinertzhagen's bird collection at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum in Tring, Hertfordshire, revealed large scale fraud involving theft and falsification. Alan Knox, who uncovered the fraud, said in 1993: "Meinertzhagen had stolen the best specimens of other people's collections and then proceeded to fabricate data to go with them." More recent research by Rasmussen and Prys-Jones indicates the fraud was even more extensive than first thought. Many of the specimens that he submitted as his own were found to be missing samples belonging to the Natural History Museum and collected by others, such as Hugh Whistler.