Richard M. Bohart

Dr. Richard Mitchell Bohart (September 28, 1913 – February 1, 2007) was an American entomologist, university professor, and a member of the University of California, Davis Department of Entomology for more than 50 years. He became well known for the courses he taught in general entomology, insect systematics, and summer field courses in insect identification. From 1963 to 1967 he served as chair of the Department of Entomology for the University of California at Davis.

In 1946 the Department of Entomology established a research oriented insect collection and Richard Bohart contributed research material in the Diptera, Hymenoptera, and Strepsiptera. Bohart’s interests in aculeate wasps resulted in one of the most comprehensive collections in the world. His contributions to the Department of Entomology led to the dedication of on campus Bohart Museum of Entomology, named after him in 1986.

Richard M. Bohart was born in Palo Alto, California in 1913. Bohart, at an early age, had an artistic interest. At the age of 8 he and his brother George E. Bohart went door to door when they lived in Washington, D.C. selling clay dishes Richard Bohart made from clay found and dug up from the front street of their residence. Sculpting of clay figurines remained as an interest for many years into his high school and college years. Richard Bohart made clay models for his own concepts of futuristic automobiles, of animals found in San Francisco’s Fleischacker Zoo, of his brother’s head, and of female figures in magazines. Many of these artistic works made from clay were never fired but some still remain intact in his home.

During Bohart’s high school years he and his brother George E. Bohart competed in distance throwing a football. This led to Bohart to compete in his high school annual football team kick and throw contest. Bohart won the throwing event two years in a row against the star players.

Richard Bohart’s early scientific endeavors involved experiments which flooded his home basement and anaesthetizing his cat with illuminating gas. The cat is reported by Richard Bohart’s brother to have survived both the flooding and the anaesthetizing. Paleontology was another of Bohart’s scientific interests as a youth. As a college freshman at University of California, Berkeley working at a duck hunting club on Point Reyes, Bohart found dozens of Miocene marine fossils on a stretch of beach. He brought back numerous cetacean ear bones and several dolphin skulls described as Echinorhynchodelphus pontereyensis by a professor of the Paleontology Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

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