Herpetologist Edward Taylor led the life of an old-school, adventuring naturalist:
As [Rafe] Brown made his career studying biodiversity in the Philippines over the next two decades, he could not escape Taylor’s long shadow. The elder herpetologist had logged 23 years in the field over his lifetime, collecting more than 75,000 specimens around the world, and naming hundreds of new species.
There is a darker side to Taylor’s legacy, however. He was a racist curmudgeon beset by paranoia — possibly a result of his mysterious double life as a spy for the US government. He had amassed no shortage of enemies by the time he died in 1978. An obituary noted that he was, to many, “a veritable ogre — and woe to anyone who incurred his wrath”. More damaging, perhaps, were the attacks on his scientific reputation. After the loss of his collection in the Philippines, many of the species he had named were declared invalid or duplicates. The standards of taxonomy had advanced beyond Taylor’s quaint descriptions, and without the specimens to refer to, his evidence seemed flimsy.