Raymond Bridgman Cowles

Raymond Bridgman Cowles is a herpetologist and a Environnement American alist , born on February 1st 1896 with Amanzimtoti in South Africa and dead the December 7th 1975 with Santa Barbara (California).

His/her grandfather, Bridgman, were the first missionary in the valley of the Umzumbe. Very early impassioned by nature, Raymond Cowles is interested in the reptiles and the birds but also in the relations of the Zoulou S with their environment. He leaves in California to make his study where he obtains his Bachelor off Arts with the Pomona College and between the Université Cornell where he studies near Albert Hazen Wright (1820-1970). He obtains his doctorate with a thesis devoted to the biology of the Varan of the Nile ( Varanus niloticus ) which he studies in his natural environment of 1925 to 1927 in the Natal.

Cowles joined the Université of Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1929. It founds a station of biological research in the Vallée of Coachella and studies thermoregulation in the reptiles there. In addition to its interest for the adaptation to their environment, it is interested in disappearance of the Dinosaure S at the Mesozoic end of . On the basis of its research with Coachella, it puts forth the assumption according to which the large reptiles would have disappeared following a climate warming. With the assistance of its students Charles Mitchill Bogert (1908-1992), Bayard Holmes Brattstrom (1929-), Charles Herbert Lowe, Jr. (1920-2002), Kenneth Stafford Norris (1924-1998), Robert Cyril Stebbins (1915-) and Richard George Zweifel (1926-), he rejects the old concepts homéothermes (warm-blooded animal) and poïkilothermes (animal with cold blood) and prefers the concepts to them of endothermic and ectothermes (according to the energy source). According to him, it is false to speak about the reptiles like cold-blooded animals, those control their internal temperature thanks to their behavior.

It turns over, in the years 1950, the valley of Umzumbe and discovers an environment deeply upset, partly by members of its own family. He testifies to the overexploitation of the environment that he notes then in a book, Zulu Journal , which appears in 1959. He devotes most of the end of his life to the safeguarding of the environment.

Source

Kraig Adler (1989). Contributions to the History off Herpetology, Society for the study off amphibians and reptiles: 202 p.

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