Career
As a taxonomist, Wheeler was responsible for the descriptions of innumerable species, Pogonomyrmex maricopa, the most venomous insect in the world, being among them. Professor Wheeler was curator of invertebrate zoology in the American Museum of Natural History in New York from 1903 to 1908. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences.
A close contact of the British myrmecologist and coleopterist Horace Donisthorpe, it was to Wheeler that Donisthorpe dedicated his first major book on ants in 1915. Donisthorpe and Wheeler also frequently exchanged specimens, leading the latter to first develop the idea that the Formicinae subfamily had its origins in North America.
For his work, Ants of the American Museum Congo Expedition, Wheeler was awarded the Daniel Giraud Elliot Medal from the National Academy of Sciences in 1922. He was professor of applied biology at Harvard University's Bussey Institute, which had one of the most highly regarded biology programs in the United States. One of his pupils there was Alfred Kinsey.
His work includes 467 titles.
Read more about this topic: William Morton Wheeler
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