Raymond Gilmore

Raymond Maurice Gilmore (1 January 1907 - 31 December 1983) was an American zoologist and a recognized authority on whales.

He conducted the first census of California gray whales and is credited with creating public interest in their conservation by leading the earliest whale-watching excursions for the San Diego Natural History Museum.

Gilmore was born in Ithaca, New York, on January 1, 1907, the son of Elizabeth M. Hitchcock and agronomist John W. Gilmore.

He was raised in Honolulu, Hawai'i and Berkeley, California.

Gilmore received both his A.B. degree (1930, Zoology) and his M.A. (1933, Zoology and Anthropology) from the University of California, Berkeley.

He was the Virginia Barret Gibbs Scholar at Harvard University (1934-1935), and completed his PhD in zoology at Cornell University in 1942.

From 1935 to 1938, Gilmore worked for the International Health Division of the Rockefeller Foundation as the zoologist on a 65-member team researching jungle yellow fever in the Amazon Basin.

He helped to establish an epidemiological research station at Villavicencio, Colombia in 1938, and, working with the Institute of Inter-American Affairs (1941-1943), helped set up research facilities for control of malaria in a rubber collecting area of Guayaramerin in northeast Bolivia.

From 1944 to 1945, Gilmore was Curator of Mammals at the National Museum of Natural History (Smithsonian), where he produced important archaeozoological publications on the value of mammal bones in the interpretation of prehistoric cultures.

He contributed the chapter "Fauna and Ethnozoology of South America" to Volume 6 of Julian Haynes Steward's Handbook of South American Indians.

From 1946 to 1958, Gilmore worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, first in the San Francisco Bay area, and from 1952, on the Scripps Institution of Oceanography campus in La Jolla.

Gilmore's association with the San Diego Natural History Museum began in the early 1950s, and in 1955, he was named a Research Associate in Marine Mammals.

In 1954, participating in Carl L. Hubbs's seven-year gray whale breeding survey, Gilmore (with Gifford C. Ewing) discovered the species's mainland calving sites in the Gulf of California.

Guiding groups of whale-watchers beginning in 1958, Gilmore was the first onboard naturalist in San Diego; he continued his popular excursions for 25 years.

Known as the father of whale watching, Gilmore was the leading expert on California gray whales.

He popularized whale conservation and promoted public education via radio, television, popular writing, and guiding public whale-watching excursions from 1958 until his death in 1983.

In 1969, Gilmore led a National Science Foundation research team to Antarctica; on the expedition, the team discovered the breeding grounds of the right whale off the coast of Argentina.

Retiring from the Fish and Wildlife Service in 1972, Gilmore expanded his involvement in cetology at the museum, opening the Office of Marine Mammal Information in 1977.