Edward Harrison Taylor

Born in Maysville, Missouri, on April 23, 1889, Edward Harrison Taylor studied geology and zoology at the University of Kansas, earning his A.B. in 1912. Soon after, he went to Manila in the Philippine Islands as a school supervisor, later serving as chief of fisheries for the U.S. Bureau of Science. During these years he began the fieldwork that shaped his life, collecting and studying the animals of the Philippines and building a reputation as a careful, wide-ranging naturalist.

Taylor returned to the University of Kansas for further graduate work, completing an M.S. in 1916 and a Ph.D. in 1927, and he joined the KU faculty in 1926. He became a full professor in 1934 and taught there until retiring in 1960. Across his career he produced more than 9,200 pages of scholarly work, including major studies of Philippine reptiles and amphibians, an important checklist and key to the amphibians and reptiles of Mexico with Hobart M. Smith, and large works on the herpetology of Costa Rica and Ceylon.

After retirement, his research focused especially on caecilians, a secretive group of amphibians that fascinated him late in life. The University of Kansas notes that his personal herpetological library, assembled over about 50 years, was considered one of the finest private collections of its kind when the university acquired it. He died in Lawrence, Kansas, on June 16, 1978.