Horace Donisthorpe

Horace St. John Kelly Donisthorpe (17 March 1870 – 22 April 1951) was an eccentric British myrmecologist and coleopterist, memorable in part for his enthusiastic championing of the renaming of the genus Lasius after him as Donisthorpea, and for his many claims of discovering new species of beetles and ants. He is often considered to be the greatest figure in British myrmecology.

Educated at Mill Hill House, Leicester and Oakham School, Donisthorpe went to Heidelberg University to read medicine. However, his "too sensitive nature" forced him to give up this career. Being possessed of a private income, from about 1890 he devoted his life to the study of beetles and ants, publishing more than three hundred papers on ants alone.Derek Wragge Morley says in his obituary of Donisthorpe in Nature, that he related a story of how, when a young man, he had swum across the Rhine at Heidelberg, "a feat which, so it was said, no one had achieved before".

Probably the best known of his collecting grounds were the ancient forests of Windsor Great Park in Berkshire where he had permission to collect extensively and where so many of his important discoveries were made.

During his career he associated with many other prominent British entomologists, including Canon Fowler, with whom he co-authored the last volume of 'Coleoptera of the British Islands, and A.A. Allen.

Donisthorpe was controversial in part because he was often considered overeager in his attempts to describe new species of ants and beetles. For example, he named 24 new species of beetle from Britain (17 named after his colleagues), but 22 have since been deemed to be insufficiently distinct to be considered separate species and have been made synonyms of earlier species. The only two British beetle species that he described which remain valid are the rove beetles:

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