Samuel Hubbard Scudder

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Samuel Hubbard Scudder was an American entomologist and palaeontologist. He was born 13 April 1837 in Boston, Massachusetts and died in the same city 17 May 1911. He was a leading figure in American entomology from 1858 and the first North American insect palaeontologist. He also undertook systematic work with Lepidoptera (almost exclusively butterflies), Orthoptera , Mantodea and Blattoidea and fossil Arthropoda.

A student of Mark Hopkins at Williams College and Louis Agassiz at Harvard University, Scudder was a prolific writer, publishing 791 papers between 1858-1902, on insect biogeography and paleobiogeography, insect behavior ontogeny and phylogeny, insect songs, trace fossils, evolution, insect biology and economic entomology. He also wrote on ethnology, general geology, and geography.

His masterwork of fossil terrestrial arthropod research was the two-volume set Fossil Insects of North America: The Pre-tertiary Insects (1890) (a collection of his previous papers on Paleozoic and Mesozoic insects) and The Tertiary Insects of North America (1890)

He also published comprehensive reviews of the then-known fossil cockroaches of the world (1879), Carboniferous cockroaches of the United States (1890, 1895), and fossil terrestrial arthropods of the world (1886, 1891). Scudder’s Nomenclator Zoologicus (1882-1884) was a seminal and comprehensive list of all generic and family names (Zoology including insects).

Scudder’s other contributions include: Curator, Librarian, Custodian, and President of the Boston Society of Natural History (1859-1870, 1880-1887); co-founder of the Cambridge Entomological Club and its journal Psyche (1874); General Secretary of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1875) (Vice-President (1894).); First editor of Science (1883-1885); United States Geological Survey Paleontologist (1886-1892);