Taxonomic revision of the family Harrimaniidae (Hemichordata: Enteropneusta)

The Theodore Holmes Bullock (16 May 1915 – 20 December 2005) specimen collection. This text is modified from Deland, C., Cameron, C.B., Bullock, T.H., Rao, K.P. and Ritter, W.E. 2010. A taxonomic revision of the family Harrimaniidae (Hemichordata: Enteropneusta) with descriptions of seven species from the eastern Pacific. Zootaxa, 2408: 1-30. As an outgrowth of his extensive studies on tunicates, Ritter took up the subject of the Enteropneusta in the last decade of the nineteenth century and published several accounts dealing with natural history, embryology and taxonomy (Ritter, 1900, 1902, 1908, Ritter & Davis, 1904). Over a period of years he accumulated a considerable body of material representing seven new species from the west coast of the United States and Alaska. He obtained many of his specimens during the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899, the results of which appeared in the 13-volume series edited by C. Hart Merriam and jointly published by Doubleday, Page & Company in New York and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC (1901–1914). Spengel’s (1893) summary of world Enteropneusta had listed no species from the Pacific coast so that Ritter, with a proportionately large new fauna relative to the 40 or so species known for the entire group at that time, projected a monograph for which he drafted descriptions and figures of all the west coast forms. Descriptions of two of the species were later published separately (Ritter, 1900; Ritter & Davis, 1904), but the full monograph was never completed. Shortly before he died in 1944, Professor Ritter gave his enteropneust slides and manuscript to Theodore H. Bullock, who had recently finished a doctoral dissertation on the neuroanatomy of the group (Bullock, 1940, 1944, 1945). Bullock subsequently undertook to update and complete the paper with the aid of Kandula Pampapathi Rao who had previously studied the group extensively (Rao, 1952–1955, 1957, 1962). They then found new material in the Albatross collection through the kindness of C. A. Kofoid and S. F. Light, both of the Department of Zoology, University of California, Berkeley, and in the collections at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography Ritter through the courtesy of Percy Barnhart. In the ensuing years, Bullock found a number of additional new eastern Pacific species, as well as receiving valuable specimens from numerous other colleagues. C. Burdon-Jones inherited the task of completing the monograph in the early 1970s but was not able to make any significant contribution to the work. In 2003 Bullock, then well into his retirement years, urged that Burdon-Jones, older and in poor health, return what material he had to California so that the whole collection could be deposited at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington. Feeling a deep obligation to see the monograph complete, Bullock then contacted Cameron, who had developed a graduate thesis on the group, including the description of a new species (Cameron, 2002) to complete the work. Following the death of Bullock in 2005, Cameron decided that it would be most practical to publish the new material as several smaller papers instead of as a comprehensive monograph, adding new specimen material as the work progressed.

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