Department of Zoology 



Research and Expeditions 



Field work brought in new material from widely scattered localities, 

 and many groups of animals were represented. Dr. Robert F. Inger, 

 Curator of Amphibians and Reptiles, who did field work in Borneo 

 in 1950, returned there to spend part of the year collecting fish, 

 frogs, reptiles, and amphibians and making ecological studies and 

 tape-recordings of frog voices. In the Philippines Field Associate 

 D. S. Rabor, of Silliman University, Dumaguete, Negros, carried 

 out an extremely profitable expedition for birds to Mount Malindang, 

 Zamboanga Peninsula, Mindanao, where the birds are as different 

 from other birds of Mindanao as if this mountain were another 

 island. Only one other collection, in the early part of the century, 

 was ever made on this mountain and, in addition to containing the 

 endemics discovered then, this new collection contains five new 

 subspecies. Field Associate Harry Hoogstraal continued to work 

 in Africa and sent us mammals, birds, reptiles, and amphibians 

 from Egypt, Kenya, and Tanganyika. In 1912 the late Dr. Wilfred 

 H. Osgood, formerly Chief Curator of Zoology, began a survey of 

 Peruvian mammals, and in recent years Celestino Kalinowski, of 

 Cuzco, has been completing the necessary field work, which this 

 year took him into the northeastern corner of the country. 



A revision of the phyllotine rodents, one of the most common 

 and most taxonomically confused groups of South American mice, 

 was completed by Philip Hershkovitz, Curator of Mammals. The 

 evolution of the New World cricetine rodents was traced and, by 

 utilizing ideas of annual crop variation and habitat-niche variation 

 affecting the physical form of the animals, order was brought out 

 of the mass of names and ideas about this important group. 

 At the end of the year he was awarded a grant by the National 

 Science Foundation for completion of his checklist of the recent 

 land-mammals of South America. Associate Luis de la Torre's 

 studies of neotropical bats resulted in three short papers. 



A faunal report on a collection of birds from western Panama 

 was completed by Emmet R. Blake, Curator of Birds, who then 

 began work on a study of the American members of the crow family 

 to be published by Harvard University as a section of Peters' 

 Check-list of Birds of the World. Assistant Curator Melvin A. 

 Traylor, Jr., completed for printing a study of a collection of birds 

 from northeastern Peru and has since been occupied with the 



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