CONSTANTINUS (STAN) GERHARDUS VAN ZYLL DE JONG: 1934–1996

Stan van Zyll de Jong as curator at the National Museum of Natural Sciences (now Canadian Museum of Nature) about 1983 Constantinus (Stan) van Zyll de Jong was born in Bandung, Java, Netherlands East Indies (now Indonesia), 7 May 1934, of Dutch colonial parents. Stan's grandfather owned a tea plantation on Java, his father was an engineer for the Dutch government in the East Indies, and his mother, the daughter of a Dutch Reform Church minister, met and married Stan's father in the East Indies. During World War II, the family was interned by the Japanese. After the war, the family returned to the Netherlands. Stan graduated from high school in the Netherlands in 1954, then briefly served with the Royal Dutch Marines. In 1956, Stan and his older brother left the Netherlands and immigrated to British Columbia, where Stan worked at a variety of labor jobs including a brief stint as a ‘chokerman’ in a logging crew on Vancouver Island. He attended the Ontario Agricultural College (now the University of Guelph), graduating in 1961 with a B.S.A. degree in Wildlife Management. Van Zyll de Jong obtained his M.S. degree from the University of Alberta in 1963. Under the supervision of William A. Fuller, his thesis was “The biology of the lynx Felis (Lynx) canadensis in Alberta and the Northwest Territories.” From 1963 to 1968 Stan attended the University of Toronto, where he completed his doctoral dissertation under the direction of Randolph Peterson at the Royal Ontario Museum. His thesis, “A systematic review of Nearctic and Neotropical river otters (genus Lutra, Mustelidae, Carnivora),” was published in 1972. After graduation Stan was hired as the Fur Program Supervisor by the Manitoba provincial government. He advanced to Chief of Wildlife Research in the Manitoba Wildlife Branch. During this period, he wrote a number of unpublished management and policy reports on the fur-bearing mammals of Manitoba. In 1972, he was hired as the Mammal Curator by the National Museum of Natural Sciences (now Canadian Museum of Nature) in Ottawa, where he would spend the next 20 years. Despite shoe-string budgets and no graduate students, van Zyll de Jong maintained a productive research program, publishing >30 scientific papers. Although he maintained an interest in fur-bearer management throughout his career, Stan's primary research interest was in systematics and taxonomy, and his research publications covered taxa from bison to insectivores. His dissertation and subsequent phylogenetic papers on the systematics of otters were major contributions on otter taxonomy; his classification of the New World species in the genus Lontra is now generally accepted by mammalian taxonomists. However, Stan seemed to be particularly attracted to difficult sibling species in the genera Myotis and Sorex. Perhaps his most ambitious project was to write a series of 7 handbooks on the entire mammalian fauna of Canada. The books were intended to update Banfield's Mammals of Canada and provide a more technical comprehensive reference on the country's mammalian fauna. Volume 1, Marsupials and Insectivores, was published in 1983, and volume 2, Bats, was published in 1985. Although the handbooks were well received by mammalogists and wildlife biologists, the museum pulled its support because of the high production costs, and the series was never completed. Stan was deeply committed to conservation, serving on 3 specialists groups of the Species Survival Commission of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN): Bison, Insectivores and Elephant Shrews, and Sustainable Use of Wild Species. He was the deputy chair of the Bison Specialist Group of the IUCN and wrote a draft chapter “Action plan for North American bison conservation” that was intended to be part of the IUCN's “Conservation action plan for bison,” a report that would cover both the North American and European bison. This document has yet to be finalized by the Bison Specialist group. Nationally, van Zyll de Jong was a member of the Peary Caribou and Wood Bison Recovery Teams, and the Terrestrial Mammal and the Fish and Marine Mammal subcommittees of the Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife in Canada (COSEWIC), and he served as a scientific advisor to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. He coauthored 2 COSEWIC national status reports on mammals—the Eastern Cougar and the Gray Wolf. A strong supporter of the American Society of Mammalogists, Stan was a Life Member and served on the Systematic Collections Committee. Stan was an extremely private person. Few knew him closely. His colleagues describe him as self-disciplined, thorough, diligent, and focused on science. At 1st meeting he could appear somewhat aloof and unapproachable, but that was simply a reflection of his European formality. My lasting memory of Stan is a man puffing contentedly on a pipe as he peered at a shrew or bat skull under a microscope while sharing his latest insights into some taxonomic problem. Beyond mammalogy, van Zyll de Jong had a broad interest in natural history that was inspired largely by his father, an amateur geologist and volcanologist who took his children on frequent nature hikes on Java. Stan loved classical music and read extensively; his personal library contained a number of philosophical and literary works. Stan passed away on 21 May 1997 after a brief battle with bile duct cancer. In keeping with his private nature, his illness was known only to family and a few close friends and colleagues. He is survived by his wife Shelagh; 3 children, Saskia Anne, Penelope Constance, Michael Carl; and 2 grandchildren, Jason and Jessica. Van Zyll de Jong's last research project was writing a national status report on the gray wolf (Canis lupus) in Canada for COSEWIC. He completed the 1st draft only a few months before his death. As Canada grapples with biodiversity and endangered species issues, Stan's broad knowledge of the country's mammalian fauna will be missed. I thank F. Cook, M. Fenton, D. Naughton, C. Pirozynski, Z. Pucek, and the van Zyll de Jong family for comments and information.

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