The work of Thomas Elliot Bowman III (1918–1995)

Thomas Elliot Bowman III was curator of Crustacea for thirty years at the National Museum of Natural History until his death on August 10, 1995. Tom was born October 21, 1918, in Brooklyn, New York and grew up there. Immediately after graduating from Harvard College, he spent four years in the US Army (1941–1944). While he was stationed in northern California, Tom attended a summer course held at Stanford University’s Pacific Grove Field Station sponsored by the University of California, Berkeley (Reid & Ferrari 1988). After his service Tom returned to Berkeley and took a master’s degree with Ralph Smith. In 1948 Tom moved south to Scripps Institution of Oceanography to work under Martin Johnson on a California Current-wide plankton survey begun in 1949 by the California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigation program. Tom worked primarily on the pelagic amphipods, but identified the copepods as well. The University of California, Los Angeles, with which Scripps was associated for degree granting purposes, awarded his Ph.D.; his dissertation concerned the systematics and distribution of several families of pelagic amphipods. Tom was employed at the Narragansett Marine Laboratory in Rhode Island for six months before assuming the curatorship at the National Museum of Natural History in 1955.