United States mammalogist and botanical collector. George Tate made 42 collecting expeditions to the tropics during his 30-year association with the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
Born in London in 1894, he moved with his family to New York City in 1912 and became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1927. He worked as a telegraph operator on Long Island until the beginning of the First World War, when he enlisted in the British Army. After the war, he studied for a year at Imperial College of Science and Technology in London. In 1921 he was appointed as a field assistant by the American Museum of Natural History to accompany George K. Cherrie and Geoffrey T. Gill on an expedition to Ecuador, which came to an abrupt end when Cherrie received a gunshot wound in the arm and had to be transported from the field to receive proper medical attention.
This inauspicious introduction to South America was followed by a series of successful expeditions, many under his personal leadership, to Bolivia, Brazil, Venezuela, British Guiana, and three more to Ecuador. Although the emphasis of these expeditions was zoological, Tate made substantial contributions to plant taxonomy through his numerous botanical collections, including specimens collected during the ascent of Mount Roraima in 1927-1928 and Mount Duida in 1928-1929. The expedition he made to Bolivia and Peru in 1926, with the wealthy patron Harvey Smith Ladrew and his valet Sherin, resulted in the collection of 1,215 plant numbers, from which 50 new species were later described by H.H. Rusby. The itinerary for this expedition has been reconstructed by Brian M. Boom and was published in Brittonia, 33 (3), 482-489, in 1981; a selection of the specimens, 632 duplication sheets, became the core of the Ecological Herbarium of the Department of Mammals at the American Museum of Natural History; the remainder, including most types, was donated to the New York Botanical Garden.
During the Second World War, Tate was exploration chief for the American Rubber Development Corporation in Brazil. He also participated in two expeditions organised by Richard Archbold, one to New Guinea in 1936-1937, the other to the Cape York region of Australia in 1947-1948, and produced a series of papers based on these collections. In 1940 he made an expedition to West Africa, taking in Ivory Coast, Cameroon, and Liberia, to collect material for the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, during the course of which he contracted several tropical diseases, the consequences of which contributed to his early death from leukaemia at the age of 59.
He obtained his bachelor's and master's degrees from Columbia University in 1927 and 1931, respectively, and a doctorate from the University of Montreal in 1938. In 1932 he became assistant curator of mammals, in 1942 associate curator, and then, in 1946, curator, which was the position he held through his last illness. He published extensively on various mammal groups, including accounts of South American mouse opossums and mammals of the Pacific and Eastern Asia, and at the time of his death was working on a revision of all the squirrels of Asia and the Malaysian area. In recognition of his research in geography and ecology he was made a Fellow of the American Geographical Society.
When referring to a numbered Tate specimen, it is important always to state the locality and date. This is because Tate restarted his number series on each of his trips and because his numbers are not always chronological. The American Museum of Natural History has his original field books, from which a copy of the botanical notes was made for the archives of the New York Botanical Garden.
Sources:
H.E. Anthony, 1954, "George H.H. Tate (1894-1953)", Journal of Mammalogy, 35(2): 281-282
B.M. Boom, 1981, "The Ladew Expedition to Bolivia and Peru: George Tate's Botanical Collections", Brittonia, 33(3): 482-489
C.H. Smith, 2005, "Tate, George Henry Hamilton (England-United States 1894-1953)":
http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/chronob/TATE1894.htm.
