Biography

Owen Bryant was an American natural history collector and oil company president. Originally from Massachusetts, he collected many natural history specimens in New England and further afield.

A Harvard graduate, Bryant began a career in medicine but left it in 1908 to pursue his interest in natural history, especially entomology. He carried out field work in the Bahamas in 1904 with Glover M. Allen and Thomas Barbour, in Newfoundland in 1906 and in Labrador in 1908, concentrating on insects.

In 1909-1910 Bryant organised and financed an expedition to Java, and invited the United States National Museum to send a representative with him. He was thus accompanied by the English taxidermist and collector William Palmer. The pair collected a large number of botanical, zoological and entomological specimens, which were divided between the U.S. National Museum and the Museum of Comparative Zoology in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In the 1930s Bryant also undertook expeditions in the Arctic and the Mackenzie Delta, Canada.

Bryant married Lucy McBride in 1932 while living in Banff, Canada. The couple later resided in Tucson, Arizona, in Colorado and in Montara, California, where Bryant built up an association with the Academy of Sciences, to which he left his estate, including 15,000 mounted weevils.

Bryant was a Life Member and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a member of the Geographical Society of America and an Honorary Life Member of the Boston Society of Natural History.

Sources:
S. Landwehr, Biographical Sketch of Owen Frederick Bryant:
http://researcharchive.calacademy.org/research/library/special/bios/Bryant.pdf, accessed 6 August 2012.