George Robert Crotch

Who was George Robert Crotch?

George Robert Crotch was a British entomologist.

Born in Cambridge, England 1842 Crotch became interested in insects, especially Coleoptera, whilst an undergraduate at Cambridge University. He worked at the University Library, Cambridge. He collected insects in Europe and in the Autumn of 1872, he left England on an entomological tour of the world, initially arriving at Philadelphia and in the Spring/Summer of 1873 he collected insects in California, Oregon, and the Fraser River in British Columbia. In 1873 he accepted a position as assistant from Louis Agassiz at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology with Hermann August Hagen. He made collections of Coleoptera in California, Vancouver Island and Oregon but soon afterwards he died of tuberculosis.

Crotch was the author of a number of books, including Checklist of the Coleoptera of America and A revision of the Coleopterous family Coccinellidae. His Coleoptera collection from the Azores is in the British Museum, London while the European Coleoptera, Erotylidae and Coccinellidae were left to the Cambridge University Museum of Zoology.

He was an authority on the Coccinellidae and Erotylidae of the world.