The Mollusks of the Arid Southwest

Author Biography

Joseph C. Bequaert turned to malacology as his main interest following his retirement as Curator of Insects at the Museum of Comparative Zoology of Harvard, after serving as assistant professor at the Harvard Medical School. An honorary visiting scholar at the University of Arizona from 1959 on, he pursued this interest he had begun first at the University of Houston following his retirement in 1956. Some fifty of his many publications are based on land and fresh-water mollusks. A native of Belgium, he received his degree of Doctor of Natural Sciences at the University of Ghent in 1908, was entomologist and botanist for the Belgian Colonial Office in the Congo, then came to the United States in 1916 and subsequently acquired citizenship. Prior to his affiliation with Harvard, he was Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History. He travelled extensively in Africa and the Americas, studying the evolution and ecology of the tropical fauna and flora. Walter B. Miller, whose particular fields of interest lie in the taxonomy, zoogeography, speciation, and evolution of the land snails of Western North America—particularly the Southwestern United States and adjacent Mexican states—has described numerous new species from these areas. He began collecting and studying land snails as a boy in 1932, and accumulated a large, worldwide collection while serving in the U.S. Navy. He joined the Biological Sciences faculty at the University of Arizona in 1967, from which institution he received his doctoral degree, backgrounded by his master’s degree from the California Institute of Technology and his B.S. from the U.S. Naval Academy.