Lionel Jack Dumbleton (1905 – 25 September 1976) was a

New Zealand New Zealand ( mi, Aotearoa ) is an island country in the southwestern Pacific Ocean. It consists of two main landmasses—the North Island () and the South Island ()—and over 700 smaller islands. It is the sixth-largest island count ...

entomologist. He was born in

Hampden, New Zealand Hampden, a small town in North Otago, New Zealand, lies close to the North Otago coast, 35 kilometres south of Oamaru and 80 kilometres north of the city of Dunedin, to both of which it is connected by State Highway 1. The township's populatio ...

and was a founding member of the

Entomological Society of New Zealand Entomology () is the scientific study of insects, a branch of zoology. In the past the term "insect" was less specific, and historically the definition of entomology would also include the study of animals in other arthropod groups, such as arach ...

. One of his most remarkable biological discoveries was a new genus of caddis-fly-like primitive

moth Moths are a paraphyletic group of insects that includes all members of the order Lepidoptera that are not butterflies, with moths making up the vast majority of the order. There are thought to be approximately 160,000 species of moth, many of w ...

s that he described as ''

Agathiphaga ''Agathiphaga'' is a genus of moths, known as kauri moths. It is the only living in the family Agathiphagidae. This caddisfly-like Lineage (evolution), lineage of primitive moths was first reported by Lionel Jack Dumbleton in 1952, as a new genus ...

'' (Dumbleton, 1952) and which has been subsequently raised to superfamily level as the second most primitive known living lineage of

s, Agathiphagoidea. In 1998 a new genus of hepialid

s was named '' Dumbletonius'' in his honour, and Hort Research has a building in

Auckland Auckland (pronounced ) ( mi, Tāmaki Makaurau) is a large metropolitan city in the North Island of New Zealand. The most populous urban area in the country and the fifth largest city in Oceania, Auckland has an urban population of about ...

named after him.

References

*Dumbleton, L.F. (1952). A new genus of seed-infesting micropterygid moths. ''Pacific Science'', 6: 17–29. 1905 births 1976 deaths New Zealand entomologists 20th-century New Zealand zoologists {{entomologist-stub