Frederic Augustus Lucas
American curator (1852–1929)
Frederic Augustus Lucas (March 25, 1852 – February 9, 1929) was a zoologist and taxidermist who served as a curator of the Brooklyn Museum and director of the American Museum of Natural History. He was an expert on the osteology and anatomy of birds. He wrote several popular book on extinct animals.
Biography
Lucas was the son of Eliza Oliver and Augustus Henry, a merchant seaman and captain of a sailing vessel, whose grandmother Ruby Fuller was a descendant of Dr Samuel Fuller of the Mayflower. He accompanied his father on two long voyages, the first (1861-1862) at the age of nine and the second (1869-1870) when he was 17. He became fascinated with sea life, especially the marine birds, many of which he was able to snare, skin and prepare as mounted specimens. From this he developed an ambition to become a taxidermist and entered Ward's Natural Science Establishment at Rochester, New York, to learn the techniques involved.
He did not have a formal training in science and after 11 years spent at Ward's, he bragged that, "during those days he never read through any scientific book, never attended a course of scientific lectures, never did an hour's laboratory work, nor made a microscope slide", his interests being confined to avian osteology and the mounting and tagging of specimens for exhibition. Yet his competency in this area was sufficient to provide him an appointment to mount and prepare avian specimens at the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC in 1882, at the age of 30, where he was given the title of curator.
Lucas was prominent figure in the development of American museums, which sought to bring Natural Science to the American public.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frederic Augustus Lucas” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.