Vasco M. Tanner
| Vasco M. Tanner | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
October 29, 1892 Payson, Utah |
| Died | April 25, 1989 (aged 96) Provo, Utah |
| Fields | Entomology |
| Institutions | Brigham Young University |
| Alma mater |
|
| Thesis | A preliminary study of the genitalia of female Coleoptera (1925) |
| Doctoral advisor | G. F. Ferris |
Vasco Myron Tanner (October 29, 1892 – April 25, 1989) was an American entomologist from Utah, and professor of zoology at Brigham Young University. He published over 140 scientific articles, mostly focusing on insects but also researching birds, mammals, reptiles and fishes, and founded the journal The Great Basin Naturalist.
Vasco M. Tanner was the older brother of Wilmer Webster Tanner (1909-2011), a herpetologist also at Brigham Young University.
Vasco Myron Tanner was born to John Myron and Lois Ann Stevens Tanner on October 29, 1892, in Payson, Utah. He spent his childhood in farms in Indianola and Fairview, Utah. In 1909 at age 17 he moved to Provo, living with extended family while he attended Brigham Young High School for two years. He finished high school at the newly established North Sanpete High School.
In 1912 he attended college at Brigham Young University for three years, where he majored in biology. He received a scholarship which paid for two years of his tuition there. He graduated from Brigham Young University in 1915.
Tanner finished coursework for his Master's degree in Geology from the University of Utah in 1916. While he was writing his thesis on the deltas of Lake Bonneville, he taught at Dixie Junior College in St. George, Utah. Tanner helped Ernest M. Hall to collect some of the first specimens in Dixie college's botany collection. Tanner officially graduated from the University of Utah In 1920.
Also in 1920, Tanner went back to Dixie college to teach after supervising agricultural projects in Moroni for two years and became a state crop pest inspector for Washington county, Kane county, and Iron county. He began work on his PhD at Stanford in the summers of 1921 and 1923, where David Starr Jordan, then president of Stanford, befriended him and convinced him to study entomology. He earned his PhD from Stanford in 1925 in zoology and entomology with G. F. Ferris as his dissertation adviser. Tanner's dissertation was on the morphology of the genitalia of female beetles. Later in 1925 he accepted an appointment to be a professor of zoology and entomology at Brigham Young University and chairman of the same department.
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