William Ruxton Davison

William Ruxton Davison

William Ruxton Davison (died 1893) was a British ornithologist and collector.

Davison was the curator of the Raffles Museum in Singapore from 1887 to 1893. Prior to this Davison worked as a collector for Allan Octavian Hume. He travelled on behalf of Hume in Tenasserim in the 1870s and collected 8,600 specimens. The results of this were published in a joint article by Davison and Hume, A Revised List of the Birds of Tenasserim (1878). He was considered to be one of the best field naturalists of his time.[1]

Iomys horsfieldii davisoni

Hume was invited as a corresponding member of the Provincial museum at Lucknow around 1884-85. Around the same time the Davison, then living in Ootacamund, offered to collect bird specimens for the museum from around southern India for Rs. 500.[2]

Eponyms

Davison is commemorated in the specific name of the white-shouldered ibis (Pseudibis davisoni ), in a subspecies of the Javanese flying squirrel (Iomys horsfieldii davisoni ), and in the specific name of an Asian snake (Dryocalamus davisonii ).[3]

Notes

  1. ↑ Duff, Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant (1899). Notes from a Diary: Kept Chiefly in Southern India, 1881-1886, Volume 1. John Murray, London. p. 330.
  2. ↑ Minutes of the managing committee from August 1883 to 31st March 1888. Allahabad: Museum Committee. 1899. pp. 22,33.
  3. ↑ Beolens B, Watkins M, Grayson M (2011). The Eponym Dictionary of Reptiles. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. xiii + 296 pp. ISBN 978-1-4214-0135-5. ("Davison", p. 66).

References