Alan "Doc" Ackerman Beetle (8 June 1913 in

Princeton, New Jersey The Municipality of Princeton is a Borough (New Jersey), borough in Mercer County, New Jersey, United States. It was established on January 1, 2013, through the consolidation of the Borough of Princeton, New Jersey, Borough of Princeton and Pri ...

– 27 March 2003 in

Riverton, Wyoming Riverton is a city in Fremont County, Wyoming, United States. The city's population was 10,682 at the 2020 census, making it the most populous city in the county. History The city, founded in 1906, is an incorporated entity of the state of Wy ...

) was an American agrostologist and

botanist Botany, also called plant science, is the branch of natural science and biology studying plants, especially Plant anatomy, their anatomy, Plant taxonomy, taxonomy, and Plant ecology, ecology. A botanist or plant scientist is a scientist who s ...

. He was a professor of the

University of Wyoming The University of Wyoming (UW) is a Public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Laramie, Wyoming, United States. It was founded in March 1886, four years before the territory was admitted as the 44th state, ...

College of Agriculture in Laramie.

Life

Beetle adopted both surnames of his parents (Ralph Dennison Beetle and Helen Maria Ackerman).JSTOR Biography
Retrieved on 27 October 2013 He was married to botanist and

malacologist Malacology, from Ancient Greek μαλακός (''malakós''), meaning "soft", and λόγος (''lógos''), meaning "study", is the branch of invertebrate zoology that deals with the study of the Mollusca (molluscs or mollusks), the second-largest ...

Dorothy Erna, ''née'' Schoof (1918–2005), from whom he was divorced in 1963. They had two children, Howie and Karen. They also adopted a third child, John. Beetle collected plant specimens with his wife and many other botanists, and is best known for his work with

grass Poaceae ( ), also called Gramineae ( ), is a large and nearly ubiquitous family (biology), family of monocotyledonous flowering plants commonly known as grasses. It includes the cereal grasses, bamboos, the grasses of natural grassland and spe ...

es. The Alan A. Beetle Herbarium, a collection of his grass specimens numbering in excess of 10,000, is located at the Department of Rangeland Ecology and Watershed Management at UW. In addition to grasses, Beetle worked together with another botanist in revising the genus '' Artemisia''

References

American botanists University of Wyoming faculty 1913 births 2003 deaths {{US-botanist-stub