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John Roxborough Norman |
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| b. 1898; d. London, 26 May 1944 Norman's first job was between the ages of 16 and 18 when he served as a bank clerk. He always credited that training to the tidiness of the organization of his work. He later served in the I World War where his health was permanently affected by an attack of rheumatic fever. That would impede any fieldwork during his short career. He joined the staff of the British Museum in 1921, and worked with Charles Tate Regan (1878-1943) on the fish collections. Norman acted as Deputy Keeper of Zoology, with charge of the collections at Tring between 1939 and 1944. Among his major contributions to the fish literature are A History of Fishes (1931) and A Draft Synopsis of the Orders, Families and Genera of Recent Fishes (1957). He followed the tradition of Albert C. L. G. Günther (1830-1914) rather than Regan. He was a Foreign Member of the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists and an amateur theater writer. He died of streptococcus of endocarditis. The hypogean fish from Trinidad that he described was collected by a local and well-known naturalist, Friederick William Urich (1872 1936), who sent the specimens to London for identification. When received by the British Museum of Natural History in July 1924, they were given to Norman, who had published a few papers on the fishes of the nearby island of Tobago. Besides certain reduction in the eye size, this fish was extremely similar to Rhamdia quelen, a well-known epigean fish common to northeastern South America and Trinidad. Fearing that the specimen could represent an accident of nature rather than a true new fish species, Norman requested two more specimens and Urich complied. He later published its report and named the fish Caecorhamdia urichi, (caeco = blind; rhamdia = the genus of a catfish to which this cave fish seemed most related to; urichi = honoring Urich, the collector) (Norman 1926). Since then, this fish species has consistently appeared in the lists of blind cave fishes of the world although today they are considered individuals of the common catfish R. quelen, a species of nocturnal habits showing different degrees of (but never complete) blindness and depigmentation (Romero & Creswell 2000). |
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