H.E. Hinton
| Howard Hinton | |
|---|---|
| Born | Howard Everest Hinton 24 August 1912 |
| Died | 2 August 1977 (aged 64) |
| Fields | Entomology |
| Institutions | |
| Alma mater | |
| Thesis | An inquiry into the natural classification of some families of beetles, and a monographic revision of the Mexican water beetles of the family Elmidae (1939) |
| Doctoral students | |
| Notable awards | FRS (1961) |
Professor Howard Everest Hinton, FRS (24 August 1912 – 2 August 1977) was a British entomologist. He had an encyclopaedic knowledge of insects and was inordinately fond of beetles.
Howard Hinton grew up in Mexico and attended the University of California, Berkeley as an undergraduate. He received his PhD from the University of Cambridge in 1939 for research on Mexican water beetles . During WWII he worked on the problem of storage of food products to counter the depredation of moths and beetles.
After his PhD, Hinton worked at the Natural History Museum, London. In 1949, he moved to the University of Bristol where he spent the rest of his life.
Hinton published 309 scientific papers, many of which were concerned with insect morphology and taxonomy. He founded and edited the Journal of Insect Physiology. He introduced an extra stage in the metamorphosis of insects, the pharate stage, in which the insect has produced a new exoskeleton in preparation for ecdysis but is still enclosed in the remnants of the old one. He was an early proponent of continental drift, based on the close relationship between non-migratory water beetles of the family Elmidae in rivers in New Guinea and northern Australia. He worked extensively on insect eggs, particularly the way in which they respire. He worked for many years on cryptobiosis, experimenting with a species of African fly that could withstand long periods of dehydration, positing that this might also be the key to space voyaging. In an article in New Scientist, October 1965 he suggested that contrary to the idea that life had evolved from the sea, complex molecules from the earth's atmosphere might have survived long periods of desiccation before being washed down to the sea.His graduate students include Robin Baker and Geoff Parker. His papers are at the University of Bristol, where he worked. Most of his insect collection is housed at the Natural History Museum in London.
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