Dirk Albert Hooijer (30 May 1919 – 26 November 1993) was a Dutch paleontologist.
Hooijer was born in Medan on
Sumatra
Sumatra is one of the Sunda Islands of western Indonesia. It is the largest island that is fully within Indonesian territory, as well as the sixth-largest island in the world at 473,481 km2 (182,812 mi.2), not including adjacent i ...
, but spent his youth in
Bogor
Bogor ( su, , nl, Buitenzorg) is a city in the West Java province, Indonesia. Located around south of the national capital of Jakarta, Bogor is the 6th largest city in the Jakarta metropolitan area and the 14th overall nationwide.Java. In 1932, his family moved to The Hague where he finished his high school education at Dalton Den Haag school in 1937. Subsequently, he studied geology on the University of Leiden. In 1941 he joined the staff of the Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie in Leiden, where he was especially interested in fossil rhinoceroses and hippopotami. In 1946, he became curator of the Dubois collection. In the same year he promoted under Professor Hilbrand Boschma (1893–1976) with his dissertation ''Prehistoric and fossil Rhinoceroses from the Malay Archipelago and India''. From 1950 to 1951 he got a Rockefeller fellowship and worked at the
American Museum of Natural History
The American Museum of Natural History (abbreviated as AMNH) is a natural history museum on the Upper West Side of Manhattan in New York City. In Theodore Roosevelt Park, across the street from Central Park, the museum complex comprises 26 inter ...
in New York City. From 1970 until his retirement in 1979 he was professor at the University of California, Irvine.
Hooijer published 267 scientific articles about vertebrate fossils from Indonesia, Africa, the
Near East
The ''Near East''; he, המזרח הקרוב; arc, ܕܢܚܐ ܩܪܒ; fa, خاور نزدیک, Xāvar-e nazdik; tr, Yakın Doğu is a geographical term which roughly encompasses a transcontinental region in Western Asia, that was once the hist ...
(especially Israel), the Netherlands, the Antilles, and South America. Many of these works were devoted to fossil rhinoceroses, cats, hogs, rodents, primates, and probiscoidae. He described six new genera, including '' Celebochoerus'', '' Chilotheridium'', '' Epileptobos'', ''
Paradiceros
''Paradiceros'' is an extinct genus of rhinoceros that lived in east Africa during the Late Miocene, between 10.5 and 9 million years ago.
''Paradiceros'' was a relatively small species once believed to be closely allied to ''Diceros''. It was a ...
Spelaeomys
The Flores cave rat (''Spelaeomys florensis'') lived on Flores Island, Indonesia. and Flemming assessed this species to be extinct in 1996, but believed it probably died out before 1500. This specimen is only known from a few subfossil fragme ...
Flores Cave Rat
The Flores cave rat (''Spelaeomys florensis'') lived on Flores Island, Indonesia. and Flemming assessed this species to be extinct in 1996, but believed it probably died out before 1500. This specimen is only known from a few subfossil fragme ...
.
Hooijer was married and had two daughters and one son. He died in Leiden, Netherlands.
References
* L. B. Holthuis: ''1820 - 1958 Rijksmuseum van Natuurlijke Historie'' C.h.j.m. Fransen, C. van Achterberg, P.j. van Helsdingen (editors) Nationaal Natuurhistorisch Museum 1995 PDF online (in Dutch)