Leslie Hubricht (born 11 January 1908 in

Los Angeles, California Los Angeles ( ; es, Los Ángeles, link=no , ), often referred to by its initials L.A., is the largest city in the state of California and the second most populous city in the United States after New York City, as well as one of the world' ...

, died 16 September 2005 in

Meridian, Mississippi Meridian is the List of municipalities in Mississippi, seventh largest city in the U.S. state of Mississippi, with a population of 41,148 at the 2010 United States Census, 2010 census and an estimated population in 2018 of 36,347. It is the count ...

) was an American

biologist A biologist is a scientist who conducts research in biology. Biologists are interested in studying life on Earth, whether it is an individual Cell (biology), cell, a multicellular organism, or a Community (ecology), community of Biological inter ...

and

malacologist Malacology is the branch of invertebrate zoology that deals with the study of the Mollusca (mollusks or molluscs), the second-largest phylum of animals in terms of described species after the arthropods. Mollusks include snails and slugs, clams, ...

.
Leslie Hubricht obituary at Milk River archive
Biographies of persons with N. American reptiles or amphibians named in their honorSolem, Alan. 1986. A collector's tale. Field Museum Nat. Hist. Bull. June 1986: 21–24. If he had lived in a previous century, Hubricht would have been called a "gentleman naturalist". His formal education ended after one semester of high school; his informal education lasted his lifetime. Professionally, Leslie Hubricht worked as an assistant at the

Missouri Botanical Gardens The Missouri Botanical Garden is a botanical garden located at 4344 Shaw Boulevard in St. Louis, Missouri. It is also known informally as Shaw's Garden for founder and philanthropist Henry Shaw. Its herbarium, with more than 6.6 million s ...

from 1936 to 1943, then, until 1973, he was employed by

Remington Rand Remington Rand was an early American business machine manufacturer, originally a typewriter manufacturer and in a later incarnation the manufacturer of the UNIVAC line of mainframe computers. Formed in 1927 following a merger, Remington Rand wa ...

as a tabulating machine mechanic and as a

UNIVAC UNIVAC (Universal Automatic Computer) was a line of electronic digital stored-program computers starting with the products of the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation. Later the name was applied to a division of the Remington Rand company an ...

repairman. Much of his time, however, was devoted to one or another aspect of natural history, including plants, cave life, and

amphipods Amphipoda is an order of malacostracan crustaceans with no carapace and generally with laterally compressed bodies. Amphipods range in size from and are mostly detritivores or scavengers. There are more than 9,900 amphipod species so far descri ...

and

isopods Isopoda is an order of crustaceans that includes woodlice and their relatives. Isopods live in the sea, in fresh water, or on land. All have rigid, segmented exoskeletons, two pairs of antennae, seven pairs of jointed limbs on the thorax, an ...

. He was especially devoted to the study of the

terrestrial Terrestrial refers to things related to land or the planet Earth. Terrestrial may also refer to: * Terrestrial animal, an animal that lives on land opposed to living in water, or sometimes an animal that lives on or near the ground, as opposed to ...

mollusk Mollusca is the second-largest phylum of invertebrate animals after the Arthropoda, the members of which are known as molluscs or mollusks (). Around 85,000 extant species of molluscs are recognized. The number of fossil species is e ...

s of the eastern

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

, a field in which he was termed a "world authority" by

Alan Solem George Alan Solem (21 June 1931 – 26 March 1990),Coan E. V., Kabat A. R. & Petit R. E. (2009). ''2,400 years of malacology, 6th ed.'', February 15, 2009, 830 pp. + 32 pp. nnex of Collations American Malacological Society: http://www.malacologi ...

(then Curator of Invertebrates at the

Field Museum of Natural History The Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), also known as The Field Museum, is a natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of the largest such museums in the world. The museum is popular for the size and quality of its educational ...

Chicago (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

). The museum's purchase of his collection in 1990 was instrumental in its development of a world-class terrestrial mollusk collection. Hubricht had 3 kinds of plants and 26 kinds of animals named in his honor. Hubricht himself named 81 kinds of land snails from the eastern United States. His list of scientific publications contains 147 entries.

Selected publications

* Hubricht L. & Mackin J.G. 1940. ''Descriptions of 9 new species of freshwater amphipod crustaceans, with notes and new localities for other species''. American Midland Naturalist, 23: 187–218. * Hubricht L. & Ralph O. Erickson. 1941. ''Another method for recording localities from topographical maps''. Science 93(2412): 288. * Pilsbry, H. A. & Hubricht L. 1956. ''Beach drift Polygyridae from southern Texas''. Nautilus 69: 93–96. * Hubricht L. 1964. ''Land Snails from the Caves of Kentucky, Tennessee and Alabama''. Bulletin of the National Speleological Society. 26(1): 33–36. * Hubricht L. 1985. ''The distributions of the native land mollusks of the Eastern United States''. Fieldiana: Zoology New Ser: 24. 191 pp.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Hubricht, Leslie 1908 births 2005 deaths American malacologists Missouri Botanical Garden people 20th-century American biologists Scientists from Los Angeles 20th-century American zoologists