Hildegarde Howard

Hildegarde Howard (April 3, 1901 – February 28, 1998) was an American pioneer in paleornithology.

She was mentored by the famous ornithologist, Joseph Grinnell, at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology (MVZ) and in avian paleontology.

She was well known for her discoveries in the La Brea Tar Pits, among them the Rancho La Brea eagles.

She discovered and described Pleistocene flightless waterfowl at the prehistoric Ballona wetlands of coastal Los Angeles County at Playa del Rey.

Howard was born in Washington, D.C., and moved with her parents to Los Angeles in 1906; her father was a scriptwriter and her mother a musician and composer.

In 1920 Howard commenced her studies at the Southern Branch of the University of California (later renamed UCLA).

Her first biology teacher, Pirie Davidson, inspired her to change her concentration from journalism to biology; Davidson helped her get a job working for the paleontologist Chester Stock.

She completed her bachelor's degree at U.C. Berkeley in 1924, where she took courses in paleontology.

That same year, Howard joined the scientific staff of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History part-time; her work there on the extinct turkey Parapavo californicus was credited towards her master's degree, which was received in 1926 at Berkeley.

She would earn her Ph.D. at the same university in 1928 with a dissertation on the fossil birds of the Emeryville Shellmound.

In 1929 Howard returned to the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History and she held a permanent position there as a curator.

Howard's 1929 dissertation, "The Avifauna of Emeryville Shellmound" was particularly influential at the time.

The dissertation she wrote thoroughly labelled ornithological fossil specimens, and paired the terms with visual representations.

This allowed common terminology to be taught and widely popularized her work in the field.

Howard married Henry Anson Wylde in 1930.

However, she was not officially given the title of a curator until 1938.

Her initial title was Junior clerk and Howard's job was researching fossils from the Rancho La Brea as well as curating them.

Named chief curator of science in 1951, she retired in 1961, but continued to conduct research and to publish on avian evolution.

While at the museum and in retirement, Howard described three families, 13 genera, 57 species, and 2 subspecies.

In 1953, Howard became the third woman to be awarded the Brewster Medal.

She was the first woman president of the Southern California Academy of Sciences.

Hildegarde wrote 150 papers throughout her career.

In 1977 the Los Angeles Museum of History decided to honour Hildegarde Howard in the Cenozoic life Hall.

Wylde, who would become chief of exhibits at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, died in 1984.

Her diagrams were eventually phased out after Nomina Anatomica Avium was published in 1997.

The Avifauna of Emeryville Shellmound was important because it set the grounds of vocabulary for avian paleontology.

Howard detailed, named and labelled a baseline for the skeletal makeup of all birds.

This work solidified her significance in the world of paleontology and continues to stay a point of agreement for paleontologists of all levels.

The names used are still widely referenced and give a strong baseline when labelling unknown species.

Hildegarde Howard died on 28 February 1998 at her home in California, not long before her 97th birthday.

Howard published some 150 scientific papers over the course of her career.

Some of Howard's most transformative work was done at the La Brea Tar Pits.

The La Brea tar Pits were filled with vast quantities of bird bones, which would provide extensive research potential for Howard throughout her life.

Howard's first introduction to the field was sorting bones from La Brea at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, where she would also meet her future husband Henry Anson Wylde.

In Howard's New Avian Fossil research she found an extinct family of seabirds.

Howard was allowed to research a coracoid bone (between the shoulder blade and sternum) discovered for a species of bird not yet known by the public record.

She concluded through previous evidence and modern avians that the bird was a previously unknown species of water bird by the shape of the shoulder and chest bone.

She named this family of pelecaniformes seabirds plotopteridae.

Howard conducted an experiment in which she took wasps from their home ecosystem and brought them to a greenhouse to see how they would take to the conditions of isolation and whether or not they would nest in that environment.

After corrections to the methodology of the experiment, she was able to collect 41 nests to study the structure of their nesting.