Richard Van Gelder

Who was Richard Van Gelder?

Richard George Van Gelder was a prominent mammalogist who served as the Curator of Mammalogy for the American Museum of Natural History in New York for more than twenty-five years. Among his accomplishments at the Museum of Natural History was the 1969 redesign of the Hall of Ocean Life featuring the blue whale which still hangs in the center of the hall. Among his colleagues in the Mammal Department at the AMNH were Karl Koopman, Marie A. Lawrence, Guy Musser, and Sydney Anderson.

In the late 1950s, while on the Puritan Expedition to the Baja Peninsula, he discovered a new species of vesper bat commonly known as Van Gelder's Bat. His later research included the study of the nyala in Mozambique. He was a President of the American Society of Mammalogists.

He was the author of a number of mammalogy books including Biology of Mammals and Mammals of the National Parks as well as a large range of mammal related children's books such as Bats, Animals in Winter, The Professor and the Mysterious Box, The Professor and the Vanishing Flags, Monkeys and Apes, and Whose Nose Is This? He died in 1994 of acute monocytic leukemia.