Colin Campbell Sanborn (1897–1962) was a US ecologist and biologist, employed as curator of birds and mammals at the

Field Museum of Natural History The Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), also known as The Field Museum, is a natural history museum in Chicago, Illinois, and is one of the largest such museums in the world. The museum is popular for the size and quality of its educationa ...

in Chicago. His works include taxonomic revisions of the

Chiroptera Bats are flying mammals of the order Chiroptera (). With their forelimbs adapted as wings, they are the only mammals capable of true and sustained flight. Bats are more agile in flight than most birds, flying with their very long spread-out ...

bat families, and he was recognised in the specific epithet of the broad-nosed bat ''

Scotorepens sanborni The northern broad-nosed bat (''Scotorepens sanborni'') is a species of the vespertilionid family of microbats. It can be found in northern Australia, Timor-Leste, and Papua New Guinea. Taxonomy The species was first described by Ellis Le Gey ...

''. In 1950, Sanborn received a request from the infamous murderer

Nathan Leopold Nathan Freudenthal Leopold Jr. (November 19, 1904 – August 29, 1971) and Richard Albert Loeb (; June 11, 1905 – January 28, 1936), usually referred to collectively as Leopold and Loeb, were two American students at the University of Chicago ...

, asking for photo of the

Kirtland's warblers Kirtland's warbler (''Setophaga kirtlandii''), also known in Michigan by the common name jack pine bird, or the jack pine warbler, is a small songbird of the New World warbler family (Parulidae). Nearly extinct just years ago, populations have re ...

that Leopold had donated to the museum as a young birder, years before his crime; Sanborn had to tell the Joliet prison inmate that the specimens had never been exhibited or photographed.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sanborn, Colin Campbell 1897 births 1962 deaths American ornithologists American mammalogists 20th-century American zoologists