Tyson Royal Roberts
is an American
ichthyologist
Ichthyology is the branch of zoology devoted to the study of fish, including bony fish ( Osteichthyes), cartilaginous fish (Chondrichthyes), and jawless fish (Agnatha). According to FishBase, 33,400 species of fish had been described as of Octobe ...
. He has been described as "the world's foremost authority on ''
Regalecus
''Regalecus'' is a fish genus of the family Regalecidae, commonly called oarfish, with these currently recognized species:
* ''Regalecus glesne'' ( P. Ascanius, 1772), giant oarfish or king of herrings
* ''Regalecus russelii
''Regalecus russe ...
''".
Roberts attended
Stanford University
Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is consider ...
, where he earned his
B.A.
Bachelor of arts (BA or AB; from the Latin ', ', or ') is a bachelor's degree awarded for an undergraduate program in the arts, or, in some cases, other disciplines. A Bachelor of Arts degree course is generally completed in three or four years ...
in 1961 and a
Ph.D.
A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, Ph.D., or DPhil; Latin: or ') is the most common degree at the highest academic level awarded following a course of study. PhDs are awarded for programs across the whole breadth of academic fields. Because it is ...
in 1968.
His doctoral thesis was titled "Studies on the
osteology
Osteology () is the scientific study of bones, practised by osteologists. A subdiscipline of anatomy, anthropology, and paleontology, osteology is the detailed study of the structure of bones, skeletal elements, teeth, microbone morphology, funct ...
and
phylogeny
A phylogenetic tree (also phylogeny or evolutionary tree Felsenstein J. (2004). ''Inferring Phylogenies'' Sinauer Associates: Sunderland, MA.) is a branching diagram or a tree showing the evolutionary relationships among various biological spec ...
of characoid fishes." He won a 1999
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the ar ...
in the field of "Organismic Biology & Ecology",
and is a research associate at the
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute
The Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI, es, Instituto Smithsonian de Investigaciones Tropicales) is located in Panama and is the only bureau of the Smithsonian Institution based outside of the United States. It is dedicated to understa ...
in
Panama
Panama ( , ; es, link=no, Panamá ), officially the Republic of Panama ( es, República de Panamá), is a transcontinental country spanning the southern part of North America and the northern part of South America. It is bordered by Cos ...
and is also affiliated to the Institute of Molecular Biosciences of
Mahidol University
Mahidol University (Mahidol), an autonomous research institution in Thailand, had its origin in the establishment of Siriraj Hospital in 1888. Mahidol had an acceptance rate for Medicine of 0.4% as of the 2016 academic year.
Becoming the Univers ...
, Thailand.
Career
Roberts has done extensive fieldwork on tropical freshwater fishes in South America, Africa, Asia, and New Guinea, and has worked in most fish collections in museums and other institutions throughout the world. Fish specimens resulting from this fieldwork are deposited in the California Academy of Sciences, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Zoology of the University of São Paulo, Swedish Museum of Natural History, and many other institutions.
He has published several major works on fish faunas, including the Kapuas River of Borneo, Fly River of New Guinea, and rapids of the lower Congo River, and has described numerous new taxa of freshwater fishes from these and other places. His research also has focused on the major adaptive features of Ostariophysan fish groups that have facilitated their adaptations and evolutionary radiations. These include the multicuspid teeth of characoids, unicellular epidermal horny projections (named “unculi” by him) in most groups of ostariophysans, and recurrent trophic polymorphism of the lips, horny jaw sheaths, and other soft mouth structures of the Cyprinidae.
Roberts's other scholarly interests include Charles Darwin and his concept of natural selection as products of the Scottish Enlightenment, and identification of royal portrait statues of ancient Khmer ''devaraja'' or divine kings with the reigning monarchs they portray including Suryavarman II and Jayavarman VII.
Selected publications
* (with D. J. Stewart). An ecological and systematic survey of fishes in the rapids of the Lower Zaire or Congo River. Bulletin of the Museum of Comparative Zoology. 147(6):239-3 17 (1976).
* An ichthyological survey of the Fly River, Papua New Guinea, with descriptions of new species. Smithsonian Contributions to Zoology 281, vi+72 pp. (1978).
* The freshwater fishes of western Borneo (Kalimantan Barat, Indonesia). Memoirs of the California Academy of Sciences 14, 210 pp. (1989).
* 'Systematics, biology, and distribution of the species of the oceanic Oarfish genus ''Regalecus'' : (Teleostei, Lampridiformes, Regalecidae) (''2012, Paris: Publications Scientifiques du Muséum, )
See also
*
:Taxa named by Tyson R. Roberts
References
External links
* ''News item including photograph of Roberts''
American ichthyologists
Year of birth missing (living people)
Living people
{{US-zoologist-stub