11 Facts About Raymond Ditmars

Raymond Lee Ditmars was an American herpetologist, writer, public speaker and pioneering natural history filmmaker.

Raymond Ditmars left school at 16 with no formal qualifications but nevertheless gained a deep understanding of zoology through his own personal study of snakes and other animals in the wild and captivity.

In 1893, Raymond Ditmars was hired as an assistant in the department of entomology at the American Museum of Natural History, primarily because of his talent as an artist.

On July 17,1899 - four months before the zoo's grand opening - Raymond Ditmars was employed as an assistant curator in charge of reptiles.

Raymond Ditmars was then aged twenty-three, and would spend the rest of his career with the zoo.

Raymond Ditmars would provide almost all the illustrations in this and his many subsequent books, and, in 1914, produced and released The Living Book of Nature, his first motion picture to wide acclaim.

Raymond Ditmars's main quarry was a bushmaster, the world's largest type of viper, a specimen of which he successfully brought back from the island of Trinidad in 1934.

Raymond Ditmars demonstrated an aptitude for animal husbandry, and was unofficially given responsibility for mammals as well as reptiles soon after his appointment to the Bronx Zoo, but he was not formally granted the title of curator of mammals until 1926, following the retirement of William Hornaday, the zoo's founding director.

Raymond Ditmars placed $10,000 in trust at a New York bank for the first person to provide evidence of a hoop snake.

Raymond Ditmars published several books on zoology, his own life, and his travels.

Raymond Ditmars is commemorated in the scientific name of a species of lizard, Phrynosoma ditmarsi.