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Thomas Pape |
I started very early to develop an interest in insects as well as in taxonomy, systematics and evolution.
I had the intention of studying the phylogeny of blow flies for my Master's thesis, but when my supervisor
Leif Lyneborg suggested taking up the Sarcophagidae and furthermore showed me a drawer of large,
colourful specimens of Sarcophaga (Sarcorohdendorfia) from the Bismarck Archipelago,
I took the 'bait' and found the family immensely interesting.
However, I soon realised that a Master's thesis on flesh fly systematics would require a much more
extensive insight in the world fauna that I could build up in a few years, so I ultimately did my MSc(1984)
on the much smaller Rhinophoridae, while learning more about flesh flies in the background.
My PhD (1990) was done on the genus Blaesoxipha,
and I spent a wonderful and very productive year as a predoctoral fellow at the Smithsonian Institution.
After a short spell working on mosquitoes and vector control (malaria and lymphatic filariasis),
I got back to flesh flies and systematic dipterology. In 1994 I took up a position as research entomologist
at the Swedish Museum of Natural History, and from 2004 I have been associate professor at the
Zoological Museum in Copenhagen (under the Natural History Museum of Denmark, University of Copenhagen).
My work on flesh flies has a global approach, and it is my intention to keep an updated version
of my world catalogue from 1996, which eventually will be fully merged with the
BioSystematic Database of World Diptera - and hopefully supplemented with an online species database,
with information on morphology, distribution and natural history. I like field work just as much as research
and curatorial work on museum collections, and I have collected flesh flies on all continents.
I see the documentation of our living world as one of the major responsibilities
for people working in natural history museums, and I see these web pages as an inspiring
way of knitting people together and stimulate collaboration. Along with the
flesh fly bibliography and the Diptera nomenclator, the greatest need is an online authority file
for species identification, which can interact with the Encyclopedia of Life and GBIF.
I am still considering how to best do this for flesh flies with the sparse resources available.
Content by T. Pape.
Please send any comments about these pages to Thomas Pape.
Last updated: 2 November 2009.
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