From 1978, he was affiliated with the
San Diego Natural History Museum
The San Diego Natural History Museum is a museum located in Balboa Park in San Diego, California. It was founded in 1874 as the San Diego Society of Natural History. It is the second oldest scientific institution west of the Mississippi and th ...
.
Work
Burkenroad's research interests were unusually broad, including
astrophysics
Astrophysics is a science that employs the methods and principles of physics and chemistry in the study of astronomical objects and phenomena. As one of the founders of the discipline said, Astrophysics "seeks to ascertain the nature of the he ...
,
Acheulean
Acheulean (; also Acheulian and Mode II), from the French ''acheuléen'' after the type site of Saint-Acheul, is an archaeological industry of stone tool manufacture characterized by the distinctive oval and pear-shaped " hand axes" associat ...
hand axe
A hand axe (or handaxe or Acheulean hand axe) is a prehistoric stone tool with two faces that is the longest-used tool in human history, yet there is no academic consensus on what they were used for. It is made from stone, usually flint or che ...
s, and
Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by his pen name Lewis Carroll, was an English author, poet and mathematician. His most notable works are ''Alice's Adventures in Wonderland'' (1865) and its sequel ...
, as well as several fields of biology.
In the world of
fisheries science
Fisheries science is the academic discipline of managing and understanding fisheries. It is a multidisciplinary science, which draws on the disciplines of limnology, oceanography, freshwater biology, marine biology, meteorology, conservation, ...
, he is best known for his radical views, first presented in 1947, on the history of
Pacific halibut
The Pacific Ocean is the largest and deepest of Earth's five oceanic divisions. It extends from the Arctic Ocean in the north to the Southern Ocean (or, depending on definition, to Antarctica) in the south, and is bounded by the continen ...
stocks. Contrary to the widely held view that conservation measures were responsible for reversing the species' decline, Burkenroad argued that a natural fluctuation was responsible, possibly related to cyclical environmental changes.
Burkenroad was highly critical even of his own work, although it was known for its soundness and reliability.
His most famous carcinological paper was titled "The evolution of the Eucarida (Crustacea, Eumalacostraca), in relation to the fossil record", and was published in 1963.
This revolutionized the classification of the order
Decapoda
The Decapoda or decapods (literally "ten-footed") are an order of crustaceans within the class Malacostraca, including many familiar groups, such as crabs, lobsters, crayfish, shrimp and prawns. Most decapods are scavengers. The order is es ...
; instead of a suborder
Natantia
Natantia (Boas, 1880) is an obsolete taxon of decapod crustaceans, comprising those families that move predominantly by swimming – the shrimp (comprising Caridea and Procarididea), prawns (Dendrobranchiata) and boxer shrimp. The remaining Deca ...
and a suborder
Reptantia
Reptantia is a clade of decapod crustaceans named in 1880 which includes lobsters, crabs and many other well-known crustaceans.
Classification
In older classifications, Reptantia was one of the two sub-orders of Decapoda alongside Natantia, ...
, Burkenroad placed the
Dendrobranchiata
Dendrobranchiata is a suborder of decapods, commonly known as prawns. There are 540 extant species in seven families, and a fossil record extending back to the Devonian. They differ from related animals, such as Caridea and Stenopodidea, by the b ...
as the sister group to all remaining decapods, in a group he named
Pleocyemata
Pleocyemata is a suborder of decapod crustaceans, erected by Martin Burkenroad in 1963. Burkenroad's classification replaced the earlier sub-orders of Natantia and Reptantia with the monophyletic groups Dendrobranchiata (prawns) and Pleocyemata ...
.
The 1963 paper was intended only as a preliminary analysis, although its sequel would not appear for another 20 years.
Frederick R. Schram
Frederick Robert Schram (born August 11, 1943, in Chicago, Illinois) is an American palaeontologist and carcinologist. He received his B.S. in biology from Loyola University Chicago in 1965, and a Ph.D. on palaeozoology from the University of C ...
concluded his
obituary of Burkenroad by stating that "Few individuals have had as great an effect on his science with so relatively few publications as has Martin Burkenroad".
Burkenroad is commemorated in the names of several species, including ''
Bentheogennema burkenroadi'', "''Metapenaeus burkenroadi''" (a synonym of ''
Metapenaeus moyebi
''Metapenaeus'' is a genus of prawns, containing the following species:
*''Metapenaeus affinis'' (H. Milne-Edwards, 1837)
*'' Metapenaeus alcocki'' M. J. George & Rao, 1968
*''Metapenaeus anchistus'' (de Man, 1920)
*''Metapenaeus arabicus'' Hass ...
'')
and ''
Sicyonia burkenroadi
''Sicyonia'' is a genus of prawns, placed in its own family, Sicyoniidae. It differs from other prawns in that the last three pairs of its pleopods are uniramous, rather than biramous as seen in all other prawns.
''Sicyonia'' contains 52 extan ...
''.
Bibliography
According to his obituary, Burkenroad published over 50 scientific papers.
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
References
Further reading
*
External links
Martin Burkenroad papers, M-1283, Tulane University Archives and Special CollectionsFinding aid to the Martin Burkenroad Collection, Online Archive of California.
The San Diego Natural History Museum Research Library
houses a significant collection of Martin Burkenroad's papers.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Burkenroad, Martin
1910 births
1986 deaths
20th-century American zoologists
American marine biologists
American carcinologists
American cosmologists
Scientists from New Orleans
Tulane University alumni
Yale University alumni