Pamela C. Rasmussen facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Pamela C. Rasmussen
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| Born | October 16, 1959 |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Walla Walla University (MS) University of Kansas (PhD) |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Ornithology |
| Institutions | |
Pamela Cecile Rasmussen (born October 16, 1959) is an American ornithologist. An ornithologist is a scientist who studies birds. Pamela Rasmussen is known for her deep knowledge of Asian birds. She used to work at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Now, she is based at Michigan State University. She also works with other important research centers in the United States and the United Kingdom.
Pamela Rasmussen's early studies focused on seabirds in South America and ancient bird fossils from North America. Later, she became an expert in Asian birds. She even discovered several new bird species! She also helped clear up how some birds, like white-eyes and owls, are related. More recently, she has worked with many other scientists to study how different animals and plants are spread around the world. She also looked closely at the types of vultures found in South Asia.
She was the main writer of a very important book called Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide. This book was special because it covered more places and more bird species than earlier books. While working on this book, she studied many bird specimens from museums. Through this work, she helped show how much theft and fake information had been created by a famous British ornithologist named Richard Meinertzhagen.
Contents
Early Life and Bird Studies
Pamela Rasmussen's interest in birds started when she was young. Her mother bought her a children's book about birds, and after that, Pamela always asked for bird books as gifts.
She earned her Master's degree in 1983 from Walla Walla University. Then, she got her PhD in 1990 from the University of Kansas. At the University of Kansas, she studied blue-eyed shags, which are a type of seabird. This is also where she learned about evolutionary theory, which is the scientific idea of how living things change over time.
Today, Rasmussen is a visiting assistant professor of zoology at Michigan State University (MSU). She also helps manage the museum's collections of mammals and birds. Before this, she was a research associate for a famous American ornithologist named Sidney Dillon Ripley at the Smithsonian Institution. She is part of several important bird groups and helps edit a scientific journal called The Ibis. In 2020, she became an editor for the IOC World Bird List, which is an online list of all the bird species in the world.
Pamela Rasmussen is married to Michael D. Gottfried. He is a professor and director at MSU, specializing in ancient animals.
Amazing Bird Discoveries
Studying Asian Birds
Pamela Rasmussen has described four new Asian bird species after studying museum specimens. These include the Nicobar scops owl, the Sangihe scops owl, and the cinnabar hawk owl (which lives only on the island of Sulawesi). She described these in 1998. In 2000, she described the Taiwan bush-warbler.
One of her most exciting discoveries was finding the forest owlet again in 1997. This owl had not been seen since 1884! Other scientists had tried to find it but failed because they used fake information from Richard Meinertzhagen. Rasmussen and her colleague Ben King searched for ten days without luck in eastern India. Then, they drove west to a different spot where an old, real specimen had been found. There, King spotted a small owl, and Rasmussen confirmed it was the forest owlet. They even videotaped and photographed it!
With her team, she also helped understand the different types of white-eyes in Indonesia. They confirmed that the Sangihe white-eye and the Seram white-eye are separate species. They also confirmed the identity of the Serendib scops owl, first found in Sri Lanka.
The imperial pheasant is a rare bird from Vietnam and Laos. Rasmussen and her co-workers used different methods, including DNA analysis, to show that this pheasant is actually a natural mix of two other pheasant types. It was not a critically endangered species on its own.
In 2008, Rasmussen helped describe another new white-eye species, the Togian white-eye. This bird lives only on the Togian Islands in Indonesia. What's special about it? Unlike most white-eyes, it doesn't have the white ring around its eye that gives the group its name! Rasmussen also noted that its song is unique, sounding higher and less varied than its relatives.
Pamela Rasmussen's interest in Asian birds also led her to work on projects that help protect them. For example, two types of Gyps vultures in South Asia, the Indian white-rumped vulture and the "long-billed vulture," lost 99% of their populations. This happened because they ate dead cattle that had been treated with a medicine called diclofenac, which is harmful to birds. Rasmussen showed that the "long-billed vulture" was actually two different species: the Indian vulture and the slender-billed vulture. This discovery is very important for conservation efforts, especially for programs that breed these vultures in captivity to help their numbers grow again.
Understanding Global Biodiversity
In 2005, Rasmussen was part of a big project with many institutions. They studied "biodiversity hotspots," which are places with many different kinds of life that are also in danger. The study looked at bird diversity based on three things: how many species live there, how threatened they are, and how many species live only in that area. They found that these "hotspots" didn't always overlap. This means that protecting one type of hotspot might not protect all types of diversity.
Rasmussen's recent work continues to focus on large-scale studies of global biodiversity patterns. One study looked at how many species live in different areas and how big their living spaces are. They found that the idea of smaller living spaces closer to the equator wasn't always true, especially in the southern half of the world. Other research showed that human activities are the biggest reason for species extinction, even more than natural factors. They also found that rare and threatened birds, mammals, and amphibians are spread differently, which affects how we plan conservation.
Other studies by Rasmussen and her international team looked at how much energy is available in different places. A 2007 paper showed that common species, not rare ones, mostly drive how species change across different areas. This work helps create a complete picture of how animal and plant life varies across Earth's landmasses.
Studying Ancient Birds
Pamela Rasmussen also studies ancient birds, known as paleo ornithology. At a fossil site in Delaware, created during highway construction, scientists found 11 pieces of bird fossils. Rasmussen identified them as a small loon, a small gull-like bird, and five pieces of a gannet-like seabird. These finds suggest that the Delaware site was once a bay near the coast.
Rasmussen also helped review bird fossils from ancient deposits in North Carolina. They found an early Miocene loon, various ducks, a crested tern similar to the modern royal tern, and a type of crow. Crows are one of the few passerine (perching) birds found as fossils from that time. The review showed that most fossil birds from this period look very much like modern species or can be easily placed into modern bird families.
Birds of South Asia Book
In 1992, Rasmussen became an assistant to S. Dillon Ripley, who wanted to create a complete guide to the birds of South Asia. When Ripley became ill, Rasmussen took over the project. With artist John C. Anderton, she created Birds of South Asia: The Ripley Guide. This book has two volumes and was the first bird guide for the area to include sonograms (pictures of bird sounds).
Volume 1 is the field guide. It has over 3,400 illustrations on 180 plates and more than 1,450 color maps. Volume 2, called Attributes and Status, gives details about bird measurements, how to identify them, where they live, and their habits. It describes bird calls from recordings and includes over 1,000 sonograms.
The book covers 1,508 species found in India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Maldives, the Chagos Archipelago, and Afghanistan. A special part of Birds of South Asia is that its information about where birds live is based almost entirely on museum specimens. It also changed how many species were counted, splitting many into new ones. Its geographical coverage was also wider than older books, including Afghanistan for the first time.
Many bird forms that were once thought to be the same species are treated as full species in Rasmussen and Anderton's book. Most of these changes had been suggested before, but the book also introduced new ideas.
While many reviews of the book were positive, there were some criticisms. Some experts felt that some illustrations were too small or not accurate. Others believed that relying only on old museum specimens and ignoring observations from amateur birdwatchers was a mistake. They also felt that some of the decisions about new species were not fully supported by research.
Besides the Meinertzhagen fraud (which we'll talk about next) and the death of S. Dillon Ripley, there were other challenges in making Birds of South Asia. For example, the main map database was lost during a trip to Burma. There were also difficulties matching information from different sources, delays in making illustrations and maps, and getting reliable data for difficult areas like Assam and Afghanistan. The Andaman Islands and Nicobar Islands also posed big challenges for understanding their birds.
In a 2005 paper, Rasmussen thought about whether the book's new way of classifying birds, with many new species, would affect conservation efforts. She felt that the impact on the number of species in South Asia was small. It would only slightly increase the number of potentially threatened species in the region.
Uncovering the Meinertzhagen Fraud
Pamela Rasmussen helped reveal the full extent of a major fraud. This fraud was done by a famous British officer and bird expert named Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen. Meinertzhagen, who passed away in 1967, wrote many books about birds and had a huge collection of bird and bird lice specimens. He was considered one of Britain's greatest ornithologists. However, in the early 1990s, another British ornithologist, Alan Knox, found that Meinertzhagen had stolen specimens from museums and faked their records.
When Rasmussen was researching for Birds of South Asia, she looked at tens of thousands of bird specimens. She and Robert Prys-Jones from the Natural History Museum, London showed that Meinertzhagen's fraud was much bigger than first thought. Many of the 20,000 bird specimens in his collection had fake labels about where they were collected. Some were even re-mounted. This fake information caused problems, like delaying the rediscovery of the forest owlet. Earlier searches for the owl had failed because they relied on Meinertzhagen's fake records. Rasmussen's successful trip ignored these fake records and looked in areas identified by the real specimens.
Meinertzhagen had even been banned from the Natural History Museum's Bird Room for 18 months because he took specimens without permission. Museum staff had suspected him of stealing specimens and library materials for over 30 years.
Some of the fake records Rasmussen and Prys-Jones found included birds supposedly found at very high altitudes, or birds found in places they don't normally live. However, some of his records, like those for the Afghan snowfinch (a species Meinertzhagen described), seem to be real.
Exhibitions and Public Outreach
The Michigan State University Museum (MSUM) often has exhibitions. Some of these have featured Pamela Rasmussen's projects. For example:
- "Land of the Feathered Dragons: China and the Origin of Birds" in 2015.
- “They Passed Like a Cloud: The Passenger Pigeon and Extinction” in 2014.
- “Echoes of Silent Spring: 50 Years of Environmental Awareness” in 2012. This was for the 50th anniversary of the book Silent Spring.
- “Avelution: Birds in the Development of Darwin’s Theories of Evolution” in 2010.
- "Birds of South Asia: History vs. Mystery" in 2003–2004. This exhibition was also shown at the Detroit Zoo Wildlife Interpretive Gallery in 2005–2006.
See also
In Spanish: Pamela C. Rasmussen para niños
