Alton Lindsey; Scientist on Byrd Polar Expedition

Alton Lindsey, 92, believed to be the last living scientist from the Antarctica expeditions of Adm. Richard E. Byrd. Lindsey was the son of a Methodist minister who was born in the Pittsburgh area in 1907. He graduated from Allegheny College and was in doctoral studies in biology at Cornell University when he was selected to join the crew of Byrd’s second Antarctic expedition in 1933. He became its vertebrate zoologist, studying seals and penguins. He brought eight live penguins back to the United States after his 13 months of studying life on the most remote continent on Earth. On a later expedition, Byrd named a group of 12 islands the Lindsey Islands to honor the scientist’s contributions. In the 1940s, Lindsey joined the faculty of the University of the Redlands in California and later the University of New Mexico. He became a professor of forest ecology at Purdue University in 1947, remaining there until his retirement in 1973. He went on only one expedition with Byrd, but did serve as an ecologist on an Arctic expedition to study permafrost in 1951. A charter member of the Nature Conservancy, Lindsey had many things named after him, including a species of insect called the Lindseyus coastus; the oldest dated wood in the American Southwest, the Lindsey Ancient Tree Site in New Mexico’s El Malpais National Monument; and the Alton Lindsey Field Laboratory at Purdue. On Sunday in Tulsa, Okla.