Former University of Pittsburgh at Bradford faculty member and renowned Appalachian herpetologist Dr. Thomas Pauley will speak April 13 about his more than 50 years of studying amphibians and reptiles of West Virginia.
Pauley’s talk, titled “Salamanders and Snakes: Stories from the Central Appalachians,” will take place at 7 p.m. in the Bromeley Family Theater of Blaisdell Hall on campus. It is free and open to the public.
Pauley is professor emeritus of biology at Marshall University in West Virginia and has studied the rich diversity of amphibians and reptiles in the Appalachian Mountains of that state since 1966.
After receiving his doctorate in biology/ecology from West Virginia University, he taught at Salem College in West Virginia before teaching at Pitt-Bradford from 1982 until 1987. During that time, he served as chair of the Science Division for four years and taught summers at the University of Pittsburgh’s Pymatuning Laboratory of Ecology on the Pymatuning Reservoir in northwestern Pennsylvania.
In 1987, he returned to Marshall University, where he had earned his master’s degree in biology.
At Marshall, he co-authored “Amphibians and Reptiles in West Virginia,” led the Marshall University Herpetology Lab and served as the major professor of 90 graduate students whose research dealt with amphibians and reptiles of West Virginia and Ohio.
Some of those graduate students later named species they discovered in his honor – Plethodon pauleyi, the yellow-spotted woodland salamander, and Cambarus pauleyi, Meadow River mudbug, a blue crayfish.
In 2018, he received a lifetime achievement award for contributions in herpetology from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, U.S. Forest Service and West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. It was the only time that all three agencies have collectively honored a single individual.
The primary subject of Pauley’s research since 1976 has been the Cheat Mountain Salamander. He is currently working with about 50 of his former graduate students to update “Amphibians and Reptiles in West Virginia” and is working with Dr. Mark Watson of the University of Charleston and the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources to create “An Atlas of Amphibians and Reptiles in West Virginia.”
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