Herndon Dowling Jr
Herndon Glenn Dowling Jr (born April 2, 1921 in Cullman; died 2015 in Talladega) was a noted herpetologist.
Dowling was the son of school administrator Herndon Dowling Sr and his wife, Ada Camp Dowling. He attended public schools in Tuscaloosa, graduating in 1938. That summer he and some friends excavated a mosasaur skeleton from a chalk deposit. He published his findings in the Journal of the Alabama Academy of Sciences in 1941.
Dowling earned his bachelor's degree in biology at the University of Alabama in 1942 and enlisted as a private in the U.S. Marine Corps Reserves. He was admitted to Officer Candidate School at Quantico, Virginia and graduated as a lieutenant second class in March 1943. He married Margaret Purcell the same year.
Dowling trained in photographic reconnaissance in Washington D.C. before being sent to Guadalcanal in 1945. He participated in analysis of aerial photographs of Okinawa and made the suggestion to land the U.S. invasion force on the western side of the island. He was awarded a Distinguished Service Award for his efforts. While assessing a bombed-out school he found an intact 1907 edition of Leonhard Stejneger's Herpetology of Japan and Adjacent Territory, which he picked up and used as a guide to the native snakes of the region. He proceeded to harvest venom from local pit vipers for medical research.
After the Japanese surrender, Dowling was sent to Tianjin, China on assignment to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) where he helped assess relations between Russian communism and Chinese communism. He spent another eight months as an OSS officer at Parris Island, South Carolina before earning his honorable discharge in 1946. He remained in the Marine Reserves until 1959, by which time he held the rank of Captain.
After World War II, Dowling enrolled at the University of Florida in Gainseville. He completed a master of science in zoology in 1948 with a dissertation on the Black swamp snake, advised by Arnold Grobman. He went on to study Mexican rat snakes for a summer on his way to completing a Ph.D. in zoogeography at the University of Michigan in 1951. His dissertation was completed under the direction of William Gosline.
That fall, Dowling began working with Emmett Reid Dunn at Haverford College in Pennsylvania, and as a curatorial assistant for the extensive herpetological collection at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia. After Dunn's death in 1856 Dowling helped to complete he final work. By then he spent two years teaching at the University of Virginia's Mountain Lake Biological Station in Pembroke and accepted a faculty appointment to the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville.
Dowling opposed racial integration of the University and refused to comply with requirements to submit a list of organizations he had worked with and to take an oath of allegiance. His tenure was revoked and his contract was not renewed for 1959. During the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists' annual meeting in San Diego, California he was encouraged to apply for the position of curator of reptiles at the Bronx Zoo in New York City. There he worked with University of Rhode Island herpetologist Vic Hutchison on a program to breed dusky tiger pythons. In 1967 he left the zoo during a dispute over animal management and research. He was awarded a grant from the National Science Foundation to consolidate and publish records of amphibian and reptiles at the American Museum of Natural History. The five-year grant funding expired in 1972, but he completed the project, dubbed Herpetological Information Search Systems (HISS) in June 1973 with contributions from the museum and from herpetological societies.
Publications
- Dowling, Herndon G. (1950) "Studies of the black swamp snake, Seminatrix pygaea (Cope), with descriptions of two new subspecies." Miscellaneous Publications No. 76. University of Michigan Museum of Zoology, pp. 1-38
References
- Stewart, Margaret M. & Joseph C. Mitchell (2013) "Historical Perspectives: Herndon Glenn Dowling Jr." Copeia, No. 1, pp. 166–172
- "Herndon Glenn Dowling Jr" (2008) American Men & Women of Science: A Biographical Directory of Today's Leaders in Physical, Biological, and Related Sciences. Gale ISBN 9781414432915